Field Crops Webinar Series - Selecting Wheat Inputs Wisely

March 5, 2017

MSU Extension Field Crops Webinar Series 2017 Session 4, 3/6/17 Title: Selecting Wheat Inputs Wisely, Presenter: Dennis Pennington

Video Transcript

I'm going to make everyone who was me who just joined when he was there Anderson you know cops educator also. Sell some tools all whilst machine that is why applies or who you host for and even just introduced us Penny is still wheat specialist and invaluable Balts. What he does his job. Is all I want you to do all right Great well thanks Eric Yeah I didn't spend until we'd extension spesh those for the State University Extension this is a fairly new position I've been here for just a little over a year. And we program was started by the farmer check off funding that was passed I had about five years ago from now and so during that five year period they got started with some research and whatnot and one of the things that they were looking for is some extra help to do some research and extension programs in the area so they are but I'm issue in this position together and I applied I was able to get hired into this position so. Half of the funding for my position comes from growers at Michigan three check our program Sol thank you for that and hopefully I'll be able to order your be able to contribute back to the industry and help move us forward so. Tonight we're going to talk to you a little bit about us like being we inputs wisely the commodity prices as you know we're not really used to be as we make decisions about what we put into our fields into our crops we've got to make sure that there's an economic basis for the decision. We've been able to throw quite a bit of inputs toward we been able to have some pretty remarkable yields as a result of what I have. Already week where we've got to really evaluate the economics I'm. Going to go through some different research to. We've conducted them issuance of data from other sources as well tonight and. As Eric said I'm I would like to answer questions as you go so if you have a question please but in the Q. and A down here and now I'll try to try to pay attention to it make sure I don't just one so hopefully James or air will catch it if I keep going and don't see it so all right so first off I'd like to just kind of let's set the stage a little bit so this is a church Michigan wields and as you can see here you'll sort of kind of bounced around a little bit but if you'll notice in two thousand and fourteen fifteen sixteen he went from seventy four to eighty three to eighty nine eighty three eighty nine or you record. We supposed to yours in a row here in Michigan just to give you a comparison the national average we feel is fifty two and that was a new record high in two thousand and sixteen as well. I plumb down here in here two thousand and seventeen this is the U.S.D.A. estimate for. They they tend to be a little bit conservative we don't know for sure what the weather is going to do and what not but they got us plugged in an eighty one bushel you'll parade in Michigan for the project and for twenty seventeen this yellow line is the number of acres planted in Michigan over time going back to two thousand. This axis is the number of acres so. We dropped off here a bit from last year about four hundred seventy thousand acres is what U.S.D.A. has projected that was planted in Michigan down from about. Just shy of six hundred thousand acres year ago. And nationally this number is at the lowest level that it has been for one hundred eight years you've got to go back in the early one thousand nine hundred before we planted less. As a country and a lot we did here in this crop seas so you. Zero up in Michigan acreage is down at this point we'll have to see what happens in the future hopefully we can build that back up. So there's a lot of information on this this is Jim Coker supply and demand balance sheet but there is really one line that I want you to focus on and that's this line down here which is the end didn't use a per ending stocks as a percent of use this goes back to the two thousand through two thousand and four crop year and you can see what the percent and use was we had one year back in two thousand and nine ten it was forty eight percent look at where we are now and where projected for this next year fifty percent that means that as a state we have fifty percent of the crop we need already in the. When we for this next year so as you can imagine that's having an impact on prices. If you look at the U.S. as a whole this percentage number is somewhere around twenty six or twenty seven percent and globally across the world that number is about ninety percent so we have quite a lot of meat and inventory that we're going to have to figure out what to do with. You probably heard a little bit about trade deals and what's going on with ministration we're going to have to see kind of what happens as we agriculture to realize heavily on our trade partners. If we backed out of P.P.P. there is talk about NAFTA and what's going on with apps or we're going to have to see where that lands and that's that could have a big impact on our ability to export greens and ultimately the prices but. We've had a couple of really good years and as a result we're sitting on quite a lot of inventory here that's that's what's driving our price where it's at today. So this is Jim. We priced forecast in I don't know if you're familiar with the forecasting but what he does is he said so a table he's got a series of formulas that he plugs in probability so he's got probabilities from ten. Ninety percent and then he projects what the. What the price would be there's a ten percent chance that there will be that we price will be three ninety one. And that's a futures price and there's a ninety percent chance that it will be five seventy five or lower so only a ten percent chance it'll be lower than three ninety one fifty percent chance of being four dollars seventy four cents or more. And so kind of between these lines this is kind of the middle of the road so there's a pretty good chance the price the futures price is going to be between four twenty eight and five twenty five. In same plane or that number is right now somewhere right around this area right here. So and that's July twenty seven thousand contract price and this chart was taken off the board of trade on February twenty third going to try to get it updated since then but I just I didn't have a chance to get back to it so or fifty five was the board price. February twenty third so let's rate just about in the middle here right about where he had projected. So let's look at some other local cash prices this is it Cassidy. This is red wheat on the left here and you can see what the crisis has been doing here there was a little bit of a rebound and missed some resistance to twenty three it closed for all four and that was a cash price that's not the futures price. To twenty three we said the futures price was what for fifty five and it for all for so what we got for a basis just about a fifty cent basis. This next chart over here is for white we on two twenty three cash price for a July contract was four fifty five zero there you can see the difference between the white we read we price. And this is it Cassidy. And other charge here this is it anyway go you can see the price what it has done the black line on the top is the three year average cash price the orange line is the current cash price anyway go and you can see it closed down to twenty three actually this was February twenty second at four dollars in one thousand and three quarter cents that day and this is for red we. Usually the way we. Closed it for almost four seventy. And there so and then this is your. July contract this is our Chicago Board of Trade for the same sitting period this was on February twenty third so I guess there is one big difference between that's pretty close so in a way go what's the basis for sixty nine futures prices for sixty nine years not much of a basis. In Waco. So with those low prices one of the things that we've got to make sure we do is evaluate our cost of production and I'm assuming all of you have at least some idea what your cost of production is if you haven't you know refined that in a while I highly suggest that you do that. This is a spreadsheet and I'm going to show this to you in just a second here that Ben Stein our senior pharma business management educators put together it's it's a little bit complicated but once you can get through it it's not so bad I'm going to walk through an example of a budget in and we'll talk about inputs and can we afford to put those inputs and or not. So everybody must have a cost of production Usually when people think of cost of production they think about their verbal cash costs exceed fertilizer chemical struck ingrowing repairs and so on there are other things that need to be included like your land costs. And property taxes and then the draw usually most people are farm and need to make a little bit of money off from groceries on the table so that's got to be figured somewhere in there. The thing that that sometimes is forgotten is what their fixed costs are like insurance and labor and interest if you're totally debt free your interest cost would be zero but you probably could argue that there's some value in the cash or the dollars that you have and best and you quit the land in the drawing bins and equipment that you. And then there's some other things in here including depreciation return capital management and so on so if it's alright with you I'm going to go ahead and open up that spread sheet and. Walk through an example of it is James Americas this OK to see or do I need enlarge this a little bit. More make it. Through. On. That little better. Drag the video window out of the way right so the top of the spread sheet has some inputs that are variable and for example here we've got nitrogen phosphorus and potash we've got those plugged in we've got nitrogen plugged in at forty two cents a pound phosphorus at fifty cents potash thirty four cents a pound and the reason for doing that is down below it will plug in how many pounds of microphone phosphorus pass you're going to put on and then it'll use these numbers to calculate that. So there's a number of different things in here you've got your your marketing cost your storage costs drying costs in here and whatnot and so that drying cost will be times higher many bushels we at dry and whatever moisture you take it off the field that so the top of the spreadsheet is just kind of some background. Information it's used to calculate some of this so what I want to focus on is column C. This is the base budget that that I've built there's a few other budgets and. This particular bridge that I'm not going to worry about for tonight so in this base budget I say plug in the you'll go up ninety bushel breaker in a price of four dollars and twenty five cents a bushel I am selling straw from here and that seventy bucks on a girl I have that in there and then you've got your government program payment so I have a total of four hundred sixty seven dollars of income per acre for this base run if I scroll down to the expenses here's where I got my nitrogen phosphorus and potassium You see I've got one hundred pounds of N fifty five P. in fifty pounds of cotton ash you can plug in whatever number is on your farm if you're low and you need to put one hundred twenty on you can see it automatically calculates at are just that number forty. So. This is the actual cost for each those nutrients and that's driven off from the price above. I'm not hurting anything for limestone in here depending on your farm you may or may not do that but you need to plug in whatever the number is for your farm to see cos terms I got twenty two dollars for insecticide in the undersides got some cropping shirts feel repair supplies and so on if I can down the SO down here my total variable costs are two hundred twenty two dollars an acre now if I actually get my ninety bushel yield I could take two hundred twenty two dollars divided by ninety bushels and that's two dollars and forty seven cents or just my variable cash costs now does that have all my expense into it. Now yet OK we've got to add insurance you have liability insurance and fire and damage got to have some labor and you've got most people have an interest expense that's got to be factored in Somehow I've got a factored in in this way which adds another twenty six cents so if I add the two forty seven plus the twenty six cents what does that give me on. Like Costa No not yet I gotta add in land I got Leandra plumbed in here seventy five dollars an acre. And that is is low because if the wheat annual meeting last year I took a survey of all the growers in all of the two hundred fifty people there. The average land around that they were paying was seventy five dollars an acre on their weak ground so that's the number I plug in here so if you own some land in rent some land you gotta figure out what that land cost is if you own all the land you've got to figure out what your taxes are and that would be the number you plug in your pre. But you know like I said this number is you can put in whatever number you want to hear and it'll recalculate all of your numbers for you so that's a nice thing about having the spreadsheet. I got twenty five dollars an acre is a draw so that you can pull little bit of money back out and go buy some groceries whether it's twenty five dollars an acre a good number I don't know what kind of depends on your own situation but you have small farm income or not. But I would like I said you can put your own number into here so now. That adds another dollar eleven. To the to the mix so if I add my dollar eleven twenty six cents into forty seven I'm up at three dollars and eighty four cents a bushel breakeven what's my current price I don't have a whole lot of room left here yet do I know what's the other thing that that's not part of this three eighty four. Depreciation. You got to buy equipment you've got to be able to replace equipment so I have a forty seven dollars per acre charge that number is going to be highly variable depending depending on where you use equipment you've got old equipment that you repair and look at old equipment you know maybe this number of be a lot lower but you're repairs are going to be higher up and your cash costs but you need to know what that number is and you need to put it in your into this calculation so not. When I add the stuff I'm four dollars and thirty six cents a bushel but the numbers that I have been here in my base budget with a ninety bushel yield in what I say four. Or twenty five price on wheat. So that being said this calculates a break even yield so if I achieve before twenty five price I've got to have seventy five bushel seventy five point six bushel yield in order to breakeven in this field OK if I get the price that I plug in and the you'll get I plugged in I will make seventy four dollars an acre. So once you know what the what this is for your farm you can then go back to start saying are evaluating some of the inputs I put a lecture I could you know I'm going make an extra pass to split it can I afford to put the early funder slide on or do I need to stick with the funny side implication that heading. You've got to know what your cost of production is in order to make decisions about whether you can afford to put on those applications the other way to look at that is can I afford not to put on those applications and there are some things particularly like your funder site application of having time to protect that fly leaf and from S.K. have. You can gamble I'm not put it in you might get lucky but there's a greater chance that you're going to increase shields and we have data to support that and I'll share some of that but I want to go through this kind of cost of production work sheet to kind of give you some ideas about you know how would you go in create your own budget in here you know we consider change numbers and whatnot and write whatever you want you know let's say I say I can only get four dollars a bushel What is that going to do to my bottom line can down here and now my breakeven seventy nine bushels and I normally make fifty two parts. Let's say that I don't get ninety bushels at saddlebag. And I get seventy what is that going to do well now now I'm at a loss so by plugging this stuff in your you can run some different scenarios and see what it looks like that's the power of having a spreadsheet and using it so whatever your system you have use if you want just one on more than happy to share with you I'll have my contact information at the end sending I'll send you a copy of the spreadsheet but does anybody have any questions about the cost of production or calculating it before and bomb I don't see any questions in my Q. and A march down here. OK If not I'm going to head back to my presentation so we talk about cost of production in the next next question is can we add extra inputs to increase your odds in if so what are those inputs and and how do we determine if they're economically viable. The weak management trials that James and Martin to go Kirk and I did this last year we had what we have about six locations I believe scattered across the state the idea was really to see how far we can push the limits is a response to higher nitrogen is an improved Disease Control from adding fungicide it can reduce lodging by putting on a plant growth regulator that reduces lodging so it all the locations we have for treatments treatment one most more or less our control. There which had just our base nitrogen rate which was ninety pounds of end per acre. And didn't have anything else and get a funder side it didn't get anything else treatment two was our base nitrogen rate from treatment one plus we added a fungicide flowering time. Treatment three was the base nitrogen rate plus the fungicide of flowering and we added an extra. Twenty five to thirty five pounds of and depending on the location. As this one just added extra treatment to and then base for we added the we have the baseline to generate plus the funder site plus the extra nitrogen in we added the plant growth regulator palisade to it to see what kind you'll benefit we could get from. So this is data from two thousand and fifteen from Jerry heck this is a trial that Merton it ocurred did and this is the result so where we put on just the my gen in two thousand and fifteen he got you know the seventy six point one Bush per acre we added the extra or added the funder side he went up about four bushels to eighty when he added the. Fungicide an extra nitrogen it went up to eighty five bushel yield and then we added the palisade into it went to eighty nine bushels So really the question is you're asking going from eighty five to eighty nine does that pay for the palisade when from eighty to eighty five to set pay for the extra nitrogen and then going from seventy six to eighty does that pay for the underside is really what the question we're going to ask here so this was data from two thousand and fifteen. Two thousand sixteen Here's one example I want to share with you just some different technology or not different technology but we're using the technology the farms have including you know monitors of prescriptions so this plot was done down at the Center for Excellence down to your Adrian. And what we did is I created these these spray blocks there are sixteen individual blocks in this field in each of them received a different treatment so each of these was assigned treatment one to three or four and we have four replications of each of them so in this particular case the red boxes received the extra nitrogen that's what this prescription map was so the farmer plug this into a sprayer as he drove up and down the field this way. The sprayer turned on in this plot turned off in this plot it was off and it came on here and then back off again as he drove across this field No I learned a few things about that I wouldn't do that again this particular set up again but what it did is it eliminated the need to bail you wait the sprayer tracks or keep separate spray or track traffic If I oriented the plots lengthwise I'd have to keep track of where these prayer tracks were and where showed up in the yield monitor so we created three prescriptions the result of nitrogen one underside and then the plant growth regulator this is the Yule data from the map and you can see the blue outline are the same plots. And then from there I just added to the map and you can then get down to be individual you'll point within each box take an average you get your you know. From from those plots. So what was the numbers. We got or treatments here remember we got our base nitrogen rate then we had the base plus the funder side base plus funder site plus extra nitrogen and then we had the PAL say down here you know it was ninety one point eight one nine one hundred and one hundred four at this location if you apply the statistics treatment to was significantly higher than than the base without the funder side but it was not because it has an eight on all three of these these three were not different from each other. So the B. means that the B. is different from these two a's so the the base plus the Presario and then the added palisade was those two treatments were better than the control but they were not different than the one where we added the just the extra life and so the one where we added the extra nitrogen that was not statistically different in fact actually in America it was a lower yield than just bring the fun side. So the bushels above the control by putting the funder side on again eighteen bushels at this location when we added extra nitrogen it actually went down by nine bushels. That's could be negative there and then it did go up. But it was only a twelve bushel increase over the. Over the control of this one so the next column is what was your dish will cost so this is the numbers I use for the cost I had we had some growers put on some put. Presario on chromo I had a sixteen dollars eighty eight cents an acre percent I had a fifteen dollars twenty four cents an acre I'll say to fifteen dollars ninety four cents an acre nitrogen was at forty one cents a unit. We priced in here I had planned at four dollars and I had a dollar application cost that eight hours might be a little bit high. But so based on that adding the fungicide here added You know it had your price your Presario plus the application costs if you're twenty three dollars an acre here forty six dollars an acre here sixty two dollars an acre so when you factor in the yield you take this yield times four dollars Subtract off the extra cost you're at three sixty seven and then. When you add the extra nitrogen your four sixteen three fifty eight and three fifty seven so your return from these compared to the control you get a pretty good bang for your buck by adding the funder side but you're losing money on the other two OK you these two you'll get better sorry these two you'll do better than the control but the yield was not great enough to offset the additional costs OK so that's pretty important to go back and look at you know if you know what your cost of production are you can determine can I get make this jump from. Twenty three to forty six dollars an acre or not. This is the rest of the data for the rest of the locations I showed you the Adrian location that was this data here remember one ninety two one ten one one five. Generally you can see there's a little bit of a trend. But the palisade this year really didn't have make a whole lot of difference in any of the cases. The last one in fact had a lower yield and many cases so you know this is kind of what you'd expect you'd expect that the yields would be going up I would expect this one to go up but we didn't have a bad lodging year this year's. So anybody have any questions about looking down here to see questions yet showing up but you can see some pretty good yields here Kingston had yields even with just the base of one hundred forty one that's phenomenal. And even rather So you guys have good yields there. OK. Just a little bit about migration rates them we're going to talk a bit about cost of production for those. This is a study done in Ontario by our neighbor Peter Johnson. This was done back in two thousand and ten eleven twelve and thirteen he had nitrogen rates from zero or the control all the way to one hundred fifty in these reveals that he got in each of the years in the trial average in this column here is the average of the four years so even with zero my Georgian he saw fifty five bushel you'll die on the wheat and sixty sixty pounds seventy seven bushels. For ninety pounds eighty nine at one twenty and then up to ninety to one hundred fifty. And then this is the incremental gain. So going from fifty five to seventy seven that's a twenty to Bush. Will increase so you certainly would put zero on I don't think anybody would but going from sixty pounds to ninety gained you six point eight bushels from ninety to one twenty five point two one from one twenty to one fifty two point eight bushel so the question is is this increased enough to pay for the additional fertilizer now I've seen some data from him issue that we tend to be flattening off in this ninety to one hundred twenty range OK so this one shows continually an increase as you go up you know normally you would expect the nitrogen response curve to increase in eventually it would plateau and level off and even decrease as you continue to increase. So you know we're we're probably in that it depending on your you know goal some around ninety pound. Recommendation that's about where we really start to plateau at least in in our clocks I miss you. So let's talk a little bit about the plant growth regulator no on this question yes or coincidence. What was the. Scene I'd have to go back and look at the seeding rate was I don't remember up top of my head. There is a link to the to the paper rate here and I'm happy to send this to Josh after we get done with the presentation and then we can look that up. OK. So let's talk a bit about the palisade the plant growth regulator nobody wants to harvest wheat that's down that looks like this and so the question is does the plant growth regulator work and how efficient Was it this is some work that Martin did back in two thousand and twelve and two thousand and thirteen and he looked at. Different rates so he put on. All control of zero nine ten ounce earth sorry ten pounds yet ten ounces twelve ounces and fourteen ounces per acre but on a girl stage seven. In this is the result and so this is the percent lodging this is a rating so he didn't put any on a two thousand and twelve he had eleven percent lodging money put ten ounces on that dropped. Percent lodging problems as that dropped to three and then dropped it wanted fourteen ounces and the letters indicate a significant difference so these top two both have AIDS So those two are better than the bottom two. But they're not different from each other and then that. The ten twelve and fourteen notes rates all have to be next to him so those are not significantly different from each other so that way you would want to read that is that that ten ounces just is probably the rate you'd want to go to going to the twelve months rate didn't really generate too much benefit in the two thousand and twelve you are in terms of lodging percent so in terms of height what happened well and went from thirty five down to thirty one inches so the higher rate yeah it cut four inches of high off the crop does that help with lodging Yes it certainly did but was responding yield even is zero OK we're an eleven percent lodging still had a ninety three bushel you'll still pretty good. Attendance rate on the yield jumped to one hundred and then go on the twelve sorry the top rate was at ninety nine and the first notes rate was at ninety so be. All these have a be so they're not statistically different from each other. So you did get a little bit of benefit attendance rate is it enough to pay for itself we've got a look price in two thousand and thirteen lodging was a lot worse. You have forty eight percent lodging in the controller didn't put any palisade down and you can see that lodging at significantly reduced the lodging and that year in this year the plant went from thirty six down to two so get it took four inches off but look at your yield. He was able to get in there and get even though it was lodged in it rated poorly for lodging he was able to get in there with a combine and get picked up now this doesn't say anything about speed or operator ease of harvest but if you can get it up you can get one hundred three bushels. Boy and it was only eight hundred three bushels where you completely eliminated your lodging. It's hard to recommend putting palisade on I think probably the only place where it makes much sense to put palisade on is in areas where particularly dairy farm for you're put manure out there on a regular basis where you've got a bunch of additional might or June and mineralization maybe a little bit higher In those those might be the situations where palace it makes most sense but otherwise I'm not sure if you don't you know once in a while you see a little bit of a benefit like in two thousand and twelve here but. Based on the cost I'm not sure that in a year like this where you got to cut your prices I'm not sure that I could well gentlemanly make that recommendation unless you know you have a unique situation where you have you know like say nor on the field. So. You know. Thank you and went. On which went on back here on this one as that would work. All. Well. If that is the question then yes this was a single application. Greenup there were two additional treatments that I didn't list here they did a fall split with a spring they put MY think was thirty or forty pounds on the fall and then the split they put the balance on it green up but. I'm not sure I would recommend putting any nitrogen out in the fall there just doesn't seem to be a lot of benefit to. Doing that in at least in the trials that we've had it an issue so I left those off so this would be a single application. That didn't answer your question type type but back in there and I'll come back to it thanks for catching that or. OK The the other key thing is is find your site application in Murti children Eric also. Marty is the plan. Disease. What it call it. He does the disease testing on these lines and Eric is the plant breeder So there they're always working together to try to develop new lines and test their minds they have come into the breeding program for disease resistance and this is a trial that they they put together looking at four different soft white bra and he's two of the lines came from Agarkar Olson's breeding program and then we had a master and diner grow in there ninety two forty two W.. Embassador is very susceptible to head scale in the diner grow variety is partially resistant. Had scale so there were six funder so I timings on here early treatments I mean the first one was a non sprayed so it didn't receive a funder sighing it was not inoculated the second one it was unoccupied it will head with the idea that we're trying to get ahead scan established on it just so we can evaluate the. Plant response and that treatment was not sprayed then we put a funder side on it flowering underside on two days after flowering and then funding four days after flowering in six days after flowering in the reason for the timing here is in the past it has been thought that your window for spraying for head scam is very narrow like a couple of day window to get your funder side on and growers are starting to ask All right so I'm already two days it's raining today I'm two days past flowering is putting a funder site I'm going to do me any good I too late I might just I can't put it on so that was the reason for doing this so let me show you some results so this chart is broken down the dashed line here indicates ambassador braai you can see that down here so these are the six treatments for Ambassador the next group of six are dying to grow the ninety two forty two W. and then the last two groups here are the two mines from from Eric's breeding program. In what you can see. The first two on this chart were not sprayed with fungicide the first one was not an ocular lated the second one was an ocular so you can see that they were not sprayed that year old was down here in the mid to low sixty's when they sprayed one look at the bump and yield and this was sprayed at flowering the next one that was two days after flowering four days after flowering six days after flowering so. The two to six days wasn't quite as good as a spring right at flowering but you can still see even six days out here it's still much better than your control so. For embassador in twenty sixteen spring the fungicide on really significantly improved all the way out to sixty. Beyond flowering so with ninety two forty two notice the humans were a little higher than the bass here here remember we said it was a partially resistant check so it had some ability to tolerate the disease but even though when we put funder side on it we still had a significant response in your similar response we can still get out six days and not have a major reduction in control the two lines from Britain programme very similar response you know. Had had lower yield where we sprayed underside there was definitely a response so this was encouraging to see in fact I think the recommendations coming out now will be that you can spray up to five. To forty four to six days after flowering and still have some impact in if you're unsure you know last year twenty sixteen was was a phenomenal year we really didn't have had scant hardly at all and so there were some people that they didn't spray a funder site on or. Control had scanned been in they made out great because they didn't have to pay for the for the funder site but. Boy in most years you're going to see your response just like this from Ray here Sol I would recommend you still put your funny side application on for have scant control and protect leave disease on that flight leave because that flank leaf is so critical for the greenfield period. So Funny Cide cost Is it economical to put on well I wrote I've just kind of created a scenario here I plug in a week price of four dollars and twenty five cents and I put a response of four five six seven and ten bushel yield so based on that have the net income if prices for twenty five times four dollars That's seven thousand dollars of income and then it goes. With Yoga So what does it cost us I plugged in percent are work around but whichever funder site you want to use I plug them in at a fifteen dollar cost here we got a little bit for surfactant and then here a plug in a seven dollar application costs so that gives you a twenty two dollar cost so if you take the twenty two dollars off from the seventeen you're at a five hundred fifty cent loss so for bushel you'll at four twenty five week is not going to pay for it five bushel yield you're getting close to paying for it at a dollar twenty five a loss you've got to really get just a little above five dollars for you can really pay for it you get six bushel you'll bump in you're starting to see a return so let's go back here how much of a return how much of a Buck did we see when we went from the let's say even the mid sixty's up to almost ninety so that's over a twenty bushel yield increase so did it paid for itself yeah it was double this so definitely the underside pays for itself most years not every year but most years it will pay for itself. Down here this is traffic lost if you put all your nitrogen in the spring broadcast you Rio green up in so you're really don't have any tire tracks from a sprayer on the field unless you put a from your side on that's what this is kind of a dressing down here if you have if you're only putting making a trip across a field and you're putting those tracks in the fuel you are going to have some loss for the sprayer knocks it down so that is kind of an additional penalty we got that it ought to push and I have. So that your penalty cost and if that's the case you've got to get a seven bushel response if you're fungicide in order for it to break even and as we said on the last flight at Morgan and broke even there all. As a general rule funder side. Foreheads can't control and to protect. That flag leaf is going to pay for itself now some of the early funder site applications they pay. It really depends on what you're in the disease pressure and what writing you have selected if you have a very susceptible variety you know you can take it you'll hit a Macaco straight breast here in just a minute we had some growers last year the planet susceptible to riot he's. Really got hit hard with stripe rust and. Underside application early to control that would have been economically official last year. This cover of nitrogen costs just a little bit similar kind of a spreadsheet scenario here I've got yes. And seemed to want. Or simply. Asking. For. Is that. All right all. I have to go back in my notes I don't remember the exact rate of her sorrow that we put on that that should be a full rate of Presario. It Or if you are you finding different if your cost difference in them is that you have a higher cost per person than fifty dollars an acre. I've been curious to see what it is but. Regardless you know I can make this spreadsheet available where you can plug in your numbers and it'll calculate this bottom line for you. OK. If they didn't answer your question type it again in there and I'll come back to it so here's nitrogen price so forty two cents in if we added thirty five cent Stari thirty five pounds of addition my Trojan kept the price of same had same response in so we get a four bushel your response what's it going to be. To. Thirty five cents a pound sorry thirty five pounds times forty two cents that started us down here nitrogen cost of fourteen dollars seventy cents. A four bushel response times for twenty five years or seven thousand dollars of income that application cost charged here so you got a total cost twenty one seventy your bottom line I mean is that you're losing money if you only get a four bushel response I must the response you're almost at a breakeven you've got to get just over five bushel can you get the sticks you're start to make money on that. Based on these this amount of extra nitrogen and that price of nitrogen and that price of wheat so. You know if you if you want to change your your we pray so you can do that little recalculate all these or use. It and down here this bottom section has just if you don't have traffic in the field already and you're got to charge that to go to this application and we have a question on that one. Additional Will what's the base room. Yeah that was ninety pounds of end of the base rate. So. So in order to put a dish and thirty five pounds on your you really need to get over a five bushel human response in order for it to pay for itself. OK. OK switch gears just a little bit I've got just a couple more things I want to cover being one of them. Straight Brust is not no one to overwinter in Michigan I'm following some of my counterparts down in the southern part of United States that's already showing up in Texas they've got straight rust on wheat down there already and so we'll see what the weather does how bad their infection is. Yes. What happens usually is the spores are blown north storm fronts so we get a kind keep track of weather patterns and how much an ocular makes it in the to the storm front and how quickly it gets here in Michigan to know whether we're going to have a problem here or not severe infections can cause a forty percent you loss or more and I did have a report to me last year. That they had about a thirty percent yield loss on theirs and they had a susceptible variety plant in fact I believe it was a bastard that they had planted and they did not put a funder site on the control so significant you'll losses can occur it can be managed with a funder site implication there are some really good chemistries out there to deal with that and then there's some research from Australia that suggests that control application must be made before the flag leave has five percent of it covered in five percent coverage is what this would look like rate here OK so this would be one percent covered just five percent covered in looking at this leaf here what do you think it is you think we're at five percent I think we're probably close to that so I would say this like we would probably be a threshold for control or probably a little over threat over threshold for control. One of the other things you can do is is slap resistant varieties the issue performance trials for we have three names for those in fact Dr Olson and his crew we Siler an interest they actually we had enough infection that they were rated all the variety trials and got some really good data it's kind of exciting because you don't always get opportunities rate like this not exciting from the standpoint that we had straight Brussel bad but it's kind of saying that we get the rate right easily so. So. They've put together a paper on this and this is available I'm also happy to share this with anybody who wants it it's also posted on the website. But basically they've got each of the varieties and they've got to rein in into these different classes so there's a few brains here that are rated R which is resistant in the percentage infection you know is is fairly low and there's a group of varieties here that are in the M.R. category which is moderately resistant and they've got a little bit higher up in infection percentage and then there's also some varieties that have quite a bit higher infection rates and then those would be your moderately susceptible and susceptible parietal Yes So this isn't to say that just because the susceptible variety is down here they may be susceptible to stray Prost that doesn't mean that their core yielding varieties and you shouldn't use them but if you like here's an M M M M bastard that we had in a previous example you know this is very susceptible to stripe rust but it also if you manage it and put a fine your site under control it's also a very high yielding variety so you've got to keep that in mind so this is kind of a tool to help you see you know what varieties are you planting Where are they at in this resistance dirt and then that will help you make decisions about how we're going to be regarding control in fungicide application for straight crust. In the same concept applies to any other disease like powdery mildew as well so. When you select your brightest to plant you know you need it in mind what the resistance are to diseases that you're in Michigan and stripe rust as is one that we just we really had a really badly last year. In with any questions about stray Brust. OK. All right moving on. This is kind of a last topic that I wanted to talk about. I got quite a few questions about this from a lot of different growers where we at with dormancy on we what's the risk for winter kill well. The let me give you some background. The Crown temperature is what's critical and when the crown temperature reaches forty eight degrees it breaks dormancy and it begins to green up and start to grow. So what I charted here is these are two inch soil temperatures from four different locations now to which soil temperature that isn't necessarily exactly what the temperature is at the Crown hopefully or crown isn't two inches deep in the soil but this is the closest data that I can hamper it's trying to use I guess as a proxy to give an estimate of what we think the ground temperature would be. The only way to really know for sure exactly what your ground temperature abuse stick a thermometer in the soil at the Crown level based on your planning but we can use this to give us some idea so this is the rolling fifty hour average to our soil temperature so what I did is I took the our waste soil temperature reaches locations in averaged fifty hours at a time instead of what is that number. In for all four of these locations and I tried to pick locations from south going north in the state and you can see that we got above forty eight degrees down south for a period of time OK And this is going from January one thousand. Nine hundred all the way to March third So this was just last week so you remember we had that warm spell you know down in Dunn T. they had soil temperatures got about fifty degrees for a period of time and it stayed up there because this is the rolling fifty hour average which is a little over two days and it has since come back down it did both back up and it's come back down again. But so when it breaks dormancy what happens in what is your risk of winter kill. It will start to harden off again and it will start to go dormant again but the level of cold hard Innes will never be as great as what it was so the risk there is real risk here particularly down in the southern part of the state I was out walking some fields down bible this field in Adrian and I can't believe how green those are there was one field that I was in in December and it was looking kind of yellow in it and it was right after a windstorm and I think it got kind Swinburn it was looking kind of yellow and it is really green I can't tell you how much it has green hair if we get a severe cold temperature abruptly You know we could have some risk of winter killed down there. The areas that are still maybe haven't quite broke dormancy yet there's still some risk. But as long as you've got your seeds planted deep enough and you still got that crown an inch in the soil or so you've got an inch of protection there you've got to get that temperature pretty low in order to kill problems so there is some risk I guess involved and we'll have to see the temperatures do if we can get a snow covering or a blanket of snow that will certainly help insulate it reduce that risk but that is something that that we need to consider as well so I was anybody have any questions about when or injury or this at all. OK I don't hear piping up so. That about wraps up what I wanted to cover tonight I wanted to put a plug in for the mission we in a meeting that will be March fourteenth and Franken move at the very end I've got a link to the registration page for that the recent presentations there we've got my mike from my consulting going to talk a little bit about. Marketing the crowd doctor also will be there to talk about writing development improvement for right here in Michigan we got we got good panel of. Growers there as well we've got two winners two national winners the national contest for Michigan they'll be on a panel discussion you'll get to hear what they did to achieve the higher yields they got and in winning the national level for we so if you're interested in learning more about we strongly encourage you to come to the you know meeting. Does anybody have any further questions. That's going to the scenery so long mobiles in your trials holes in optimal scenery along me all. On a lonely clay soil optimum seeding rate. C rate is going to be highly dependent upon at the time of planting if you can plant early in it you know you want to get after the fly free date that's a good time to start planting which is depending on where you are in the state mid September eighteenth or nineteenth September. Up north it's a little bit earlier but you want to plant after that if you're planting early you say before October one you can get away with a lot lower population maybe one point four million seeds per acre as you get later and later you want to bump that number if you're planning toward the end of October and November you may want to bump that to point one or even two point two million seeds break so if you're in that early to mid October maybe one point six to one point eight million seeds per acre would be a good target to shoot for and the other thing that's critical about that a lot of people talk about I put on so many bushels per acre. I strongly encourage you to look at your label see how many seeds perp. And you have to look at a chart in there I've got a chart on the Web site. Has based on how many seats per pound what that translates into and how many pounds you need to put on to get one point four one point six one point break or so you need to calibrate your drill based put on seeds per acre not. Not you know bushels per acre which is what you know that's what my dad used to do this or grandpa used to do you know everybody used to throw on you know two or two and I have bushels the acre but even if I planted Sunburst and. The other one. Was a white one. Jupiter and one of them had seeds per pound of ninety nine ninety eight I think one thousand nine hundred ninety eight the other one had fourteen thousand nine hundred ninety five Secret big difference in the size of the seed in the amount of seat you need to put out there to get same seating you want to treat it just like corn you know you don't put corn on by how many bags to the acres. Good question OK One of the things I typed in the chat Pod if you anybody is on Twitter if you want to follow me at it's part of my e-mail at ten thirty four. Here's some of the things I've watched on Twitter I try to put things up here that are relevant to wheat growers and what's going on this is just a chart of farm bill spending cuts for starting part of the farm bill but like here's a picture from Kansas State meat showing development where they they don't down here and so on. In Oklahoma they have even showing up so I posted information on how do we scout for a fence here in Michigan. Here's a. West if you were flying straight for us to post a photo Here's the frost farm down in Texas all this is current what's going on this was posted on the third of March just a couple days ago. Most from the. Clark County classic So I try to put information in here that's relevant to. Producers in particular as we get into the season staying on top of where the disease is what's going on and what is it will be forward or what diseases are coming and we worried about this is this is a good way for me to quickly get information out so if you just want to follow we hadn't thirty four outraged keep up to date on what's going on but we. Won't all generals. Won't. You bet my pleasure.