Farming in southwest Kansas isn’t for the faint of heart. Producing a crop in an arid climate can be a challenge, but this year, Luke Jaeger is thankful for some much needed rain.
“It was the wettest November on record for us in some areas of the farm, which is crazy this time of year.” says Jaeger, a farmer in Minneola, Kan.
For an area that typically receives less than 20" of rain each year, Jaeger says some of his farms have seen 6" of rain during the month of November alone.
The deluge of rain is much needed moisture the winter wheat is soaking up, and it’s also planting ideas for different crop plans next spring.
“I was just talking with our local dealer here about how on our farm, for the first time ever, we will probably plant more dryland corn than we will grain sorghum, because of the subsoil moisture we have in the ground.
Jaeger and his brother farm a mix of corn, sorghum, soybeans and wheat, most of which is dryland, across 20,000 acres.
“Every year, my brother and I, Matthew, take a 30,000' approach and poke holes in our operation to find where we are spending too much money and where can we save,” Jaeger says.
A never ending journey to solve problems on their own farm, they started EGE Products to manufacture specialty ag chemicals and fertilizers.
“I like to say our farm is a 20,000 acre research farm,” Jaeger says. “In our office, we have a full-scale laboratory with formulation chemists, Ph.D.s, chemists and chemical engineers. So, we see problems on the farm and bring them back to our formulations team to work on solutions.”
With the farm to then put those products to the test, Jaeger says it’s a constant journey to innovate.
“I think it’s important to be relevant in the marketplace and always be innovating, whether it’s on the farm or with EGE. We’re always trying to innovate,” Jaeger says. “I think if you’re not innovating, you’re dying. A lot of people bristle at adopting newer technologies and we just dive right into it and go.”
One of the latest products they decided to try wasn’t something they produced on their own. Instead, it was added to their sprayer: John Deere’s See & Spray.
“It’s like that technology was built for our farm,” Jaeger says. “We didn’t approach See & Spray technology to specifically reduce costs. A lot of it was reducing the toxicity of some of the chemicals that we were using on the farm.”
Able to Use More Effective, But More Expensive Herbicides
Jaeger says they run their sprayer 11 months out of the year, and he’s the one who’s typically in the driver’s seat.
“I put about 600 hours a year in the seat of one of our sprayers, and I don’t like Paraquat,” he explains. “What See & Spray has allowed us to do is chemistries that perform the same, but they were a little too expensive, it has allowed us to integrate that chemistry more into our operation.”
Jaeger says in his area, a chemistry like Paraquat is widely used out of necessity, mainly because it’s the most affordable and best option available for farmers
However, they Jaegers don’t like to use that particular herbicide, saying it drifts too much and is too toxic. Now, thanks to the new spraying technology that allows them to only spray where weeds are present, their farm has been able to make the switch.
“It’s allowed us to move to other chemistries that were more expensive and hard to justify when you were spraying every acre. And now we’ve been able able to move to to some of those less toxic. I mean, the chemistry that we use now is less toxic than table salt. So, I mean, you can get real excited about that,” said Jaeger.
The Battle Against Resistant Weeds
Instead of looking at the technology to save on costs, Jaeger sees it as a way to do a more effective job.
“I found that we’re going out earlier, more often than we normally would,” he adds. “If you’re going to blanket spray, you want to wait until there are enough weeds out there to justify the the application. And for us, we didn’t. We don’t have to wait because we know maybe we’re only going to spray 5% of the field.”
Because of their location, the Jaegers had to transition to nearly 100% no-till, a necessity to control wind erosion and help preserve and protect any moisture in the soil.
“A lot of farmers have had to abandon no till because it’s just too expensive, and it became harder and harder to control those resistant weeds,” Jaeger says. “But with this technology, I think we’re going to see more farmers coming back into no till because they can cost effectively control those weeds.
In 2011, it was kochia that Roundup herbicide would no longer control. Now Jaeger says Pigweed and resistant grasses, like switchgrass, have become a yearly battle.
“What this See & Spray technology allows us to do is run a more concentrated spray mixture, a high rate of glyphosate or cluster them. But we’re only spraying that particular weed and not the whole field. So, we can run a higher rate of that chemical, get way better control, and our costs are still very minimal because we’re only spraying that target weed that’s out there,” he explained.
When farming smarter and always trying to innovate, the Jaegers say it’s technology like See & Spray that seems to have a perfect fit here in southwest Kansas.
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