Hello, and welcome to the Talking Crop Podcast. My name is Kathryn Seebruck, and I'm a Commercial Agriculture educator with University of Illinois Extension serving Jo Daviess, Stephenson, and Winnebago Counties. Talking Crop is a row crop production podcast with episodes occurring every other week during the growing season between May and September. In each episode, I bring on a guest speaker to discuss topics related to their areas of expertise. In today's episode, I am joined by Jared Fender and Sam Laskanich, both of which are students and researchers in the crop physiology lab in Department of Crop Sciences at University of Illinois.
Kathryn: 00:46Sam offered his expertise on the physiology of corn roots and his unique corn root classification system, along with his findings on short stature corn roots. And Jared shared his knowledge of various fertilizer placements and timing with strip till and how corn hybrids differ in their responses to these treatments. In the episode description, you'll find the website for the crop physiology lab where you can find much of the group's research results, including the slides for the field day that we mentioned in the episode. For the next and final episode of this season of Talking Crop, Salah Issa, an assistant professor with the University of Illinois Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department, joins me to discuss ag safety in general and grain bin safety in particular. That episode will air on Wednesday, September 17.
Kathryn: 01:33And now please enjoy this episode of Talking Crop Characterizing Corn, Roots, Short Corn, and Strip Till with Jared Fender and Sam Laskanich. Sam and Jared, hello, and welcome to the Talking Crop Podcast. Thank you both for being here today. I'm excited to talk to you both about the work that you do in the Crop Physiology Lab. And so Sam, could you start by first introducing yourself and then Jared introduce yourself and then we'll get started with our questions.
Sam: 02:00Yeah, thanks for having us today, Kathryn. I'm Sam Laskanich. I'm a third year PhD student here at the Crop Physiology Laboratory at the University of Illinois. And my research works with corn roots and how we compare that corn root hybrid with the proper management so that we can really, have success and get the most out of our management that we can.
Jared: 02:28And I'm Jared Fender. I'm actually Dr. Below's full time research technician, but also decided to start a master's about two years ago. So double dip in there, within the system and, manage all the equipment with Dr. Below. Anything that involves our research is kind of involved or controlled by me. And then also, my master's project has started to look at strip till performance and then also looking at hybrid performance within strip till, in the future.
Kathryn: 02:57Great. I'm a huge fan of your guys' lab. I love the work that you guys do. I think it's super interesting. Your field day is also a lot of fun to attend, so I also like to encourage people, if they can get down there, at least folks from up here, to your field day, I always like to encourage that because you guys do a lot of really great, very applied work and very relevant work to farmers hoping to boost their yields. Like I said in the beginning, I think we're going to start first with Sam. Sam, you said that a lot of your work focuses on corn roots, which I find really interesting because a lot of the time we're mostly focused on the above ground portions of the plant. Can you talk about kind of in general why you look at roots in particular?
Sam: 03:41Yeah. Roots are pretty easy to forget about. I mean they're underground. You don't see them every day. They're not easy to study.
Sam: 03:51One root could look a little bit different than a different root. There's little bit of variation, but what we've seen is that hybrids are very consistent in their root architecture. Onne hybrid, you might have a large root, another hybrid, you might have a smaller root. And so how can we take that information and be able to apply it to our management? The first thing we had to do is we actually had to be able to quantify what we're looking at. There's a few different parameters that we really should be looking at. There's not just one because there's a lot of different things going on in a root system. The first thing I look at is surface area. Surface area is very important because it tells you how much of the root is actually contacting the soil. That's obviously very important for nutrient uptake, moisture uptake.
Sam: 04:48So really important parameter there. The next one I wanna look at is angle. Now angle, a lot of people don't really realize, but they think either big root or small root. But angle is actually probably one of the most important parameters. It determines the direction of growth. If you're growing towards or maybe even away from fertility that could be either a good thing or a bad thing. So angle is also very important. The next parameter that we're looking at is mass. And so just getting a weight of that root system to quantify basically the amount of energy that plant is putting into the root system. Roots are really expensive to grow.
Sam: 05:30It takes a lot of carbon to build that root system. So if you're building a big root system and it's not going to where it needs to go, then that's wasted energy. What I did is I took all these parameters and put them into one rating. So surface area, angle, and mass. The acronym for that spells SAM. It works perfectly because, obviously, my name is Sam. We're using those three to characterize hybrid root architecture.
Kathryn: 06:01Perfect. Can you copyright that? Can you, like, say Sam with know.
Sam: 06:05I've had a lot people tell me I should. Yeah.
Kathryn: 06:06That would be pretty fun. That's all super interesting. You mentioned how studying roots and measuring roots is pretty difficult. Like I said, I've been to your field days, so I know what this looks like. Can you describe how you do the work to actually take these measurements?
Sam: 06:24Yeah. It's quite a long process. This year, we did 3,675 roots imaged at the end of the day. So quite a bit of roots. We go out there, we dig them up and then each root has to be individually labeled to make sure it gets throughout the whole process and we're not mixing roots up.
Sam: 06:49And then we bring them in, we soak them in water, and then we pressure wash them, and then we take them into the lab and we actually image them. We use something called the Corn Root Observation Platform or the CROP for short. What it is, it's a box that has cameras on the side and on the top. We put the root in this box and then it rotates around and it gets an image of all four sides. I'm working with Dr. Tony Grift and Dr. Martin Bohn who actually developed this corner observation platform. And it's taking a lot of different measurements like surface area that I mentioned, angle, it can do stalk diameter, it can do a little bit of root lodging stuff, root depth stuff. It's a high thoroughput machine. We really have used quite a bit of data from it and we're still learning how to manage all that and be able to actually apply it to an agronomic scenario. We do all this and then we weigh it. And that's how we're able to get our measurements.
Kathryn: 07:57And you mentioned how every hybrid has kind of a certain classification of their root system, at least that's what you've found. Now, do you know if that root classification obviously, the breeders weren't necessarily using the SAM rating, right? But do these hybrids get bred to have certain root characteristics? Or is this kind of the first time that these hybrids have had their roots characterized in such a way?
Sam: 08:25They've briefly looked at it in the past, different parameters, maybe surface area, or maybe they're looking at angle. They found that root angle is actually very hereditary. That's partially what makes it so consistent within each hybrid. They've briefly looked at them, but I don't know if they've, like, combined them all together quite the way that I have. I've split them into two categories per parameter. Surface area and mass, we categorize it as either small or large. Our angle, we characterize it as either narrow or wide. Instead of using more of a quantitative where we're looking at numbers, mine's more qualitative where it just divides it into groups. Makes it a little bit more simpler, easier to follow, especially for the farmer like my father, like Jared here, like myself. It just makes it a little bit easier to look at.
Kathryn: 09:25With this classification, like you said, you have the narrow and the wide angle or the large and small root mass. Have you kind of put these different characterizations into kind of another category of being either good or bad. Can these characterizations be either good or bad? Or is it pretty just neutral across the board?
Sam: 09:48It depends. It's the famous agronomic. There's not a perfect root system. Obviously, your root has to be big enough to get to the nutrients and nutrition and water that it needs. That's the main goal of the roots.
Sam: 10:03Now in different management systems, that could be different fertilizer placements, different fertilizer timings that could determine, hey, maybe this root architecture is better for this system. Or maybe if you're in different soil types, if you're in more of a poor soil versus a very rich soil. There's a lot of things going on and it partially determines which root type might fit in which management.
Kathryn: 10:31I'm glad you mentioned that because I was just wondering if these have a kind of a genetic component to them. Of course, as we know, there's also that genotype by environment interaction. How you manage them, do you know if there's an easy via management to kind of change the inherent structure of these roots?
Sam: 10:53Yeah. We very easily change how big the root is. For example, we published a paper that shows for every 1,000 plant per acre increase, you have a two and a half percent decrease in root mass. If we're trying to grow more plants, when trying to get more ears out there, trying to increase yield, we actually have smaller root system. We have to be able to better manage those higher plant populations, especially because they have that smaller root system. There are ways to manipulate it. Different environments are going to change your root architecture. A rich fertility soil is gonna probably build a bigger root system than a poor fertility soil just because it has more nutrients for that root to grow. But what we've seen is that the hybrids rank similarly at each site. Down in Southern Illinois, where there's not as much organic matter, we've seen a little bit smaller roots. But those hybrids rank the same there as they would in Central Northern Illinois, where there's, richer organic matter.
Kathryn: 12:01It's interesting as you're talking about this, I'm just thinking about how when a farmer is choosing a hybrid, there's so many different things that they have to think about in terms of choosing the right one. Adding roots into the mix is a further complication of that. But it's obviously important because it can have pretty significant effects on how it is managed and how it functions in different environments. I wondered if you also know, are these root characteristics, are these something that are being reported with different hybrids? These may not necessarily have that quote unquote SAM rating attached to them officially, but are there hybrid kind of characterizations of roots that farmers can see like in a catalog, for example, with their seed salesman?
Sam: 12:48Yeah. Absolutely. It varies from company to company. Some will for example, Beck's Hybrids, we're working pretty closely with them. They've gotten pretty good at characterizing the angle. They call it horizontal, which I call wide, or they call it vertical, which I call narrow, or they call it balanced, which is kind of in between. So that's one example. They're actually using similar methods to us where they're also using the corn root observation platform. But it varies for different companies. So like Syngenta, they have their own characterization.
Sam: 13:26AgriGold, they have their own type they call modified. But as a farmer, I don't necessarily know what modified means or how we can apply it. The goal is, obviously, I'd love to standardize the SAM rating across brands, that would be awesome. But we want to see how we can take this root type and really apply it to that seed catalog to help farmers determine, hey, this is my management operation, which hybrid fits into that management.
Kathryn: 13:59Switching gears a little bit, into the realm of short corn. This is what you talked about at your field day a couple of weeks ago. I think it's interesting how you're talking about you're characterizing the roots of these hybrids, and now you have a whole another new type of hybrid thrown in there, and you're trying to figure out how to characterize their roots as well. So can you talk first a little bit about just short corn in general, then we'll talk about the findings that you've found. Can you talk about short corn in terms of what brought on the need or the desire to breed these hybrids? Is this something that you think in your opinion, since you've been working on it, is going to catch on in the future?
Sam: 14:44Yeah. So if we think about way early back in the green revolution, Borlaug was one of the plant breeders who really developed some dwarf varieties for wheat, for rice. They shortened those, but corn, that's really the only grass crop that really hasn't been shortened. That's kind of the next frontier for the crop to shorten. It really makes sense. First we see a few different advantages for it. The first one is you get extended in season access for applications. This year, like tar spot, is a huge disease in Illinois, I believe it's pretty bad, especially this year when it's a little bit wetter. But the first case in Illinois, I believe was found in June. If it's happening that early, you're gonna have to make one, maybe even two applications of fungicide. To do that, you either have to have a specialized highboy or use a plane or helicopter or even maybe a drone. Or if you have short corn, you can actually get access with a typical sprayer, if you're able to get over that canopy a little bit easier. It gi definitely gives you extended in season access for fungicide applications or maybe even a later season nitrogen application if needed. If it's been a really wet season, you can give that plant a later season boost of nutrition. That's definitely one advantage that we see. The next one that we see is, we see less lodging with short corn. Actually, it's pretty neat. It shortens the inner node below the ear, but it actually makes that stock thicker. We've seen in our studies, it makes it 11 to 18% larger stalk diameter, right at the base of the plant. That really helps with the stalk lodging later in the season. I'm not saying it's not ever going to lodge, but we've seen a lot less lodging with it. In 2021 in Yorkville, Illinois, so Northern Illinois, when those derechos came through, we had a lot of tall stature hybrids lodged. We had a short corn trial. There were still a few plants, but it was much easier to harvest.
Sam: 17:12We were still able to get that done pretty, pretty accurately and easily. The reason that we see less lodging is a physiological advantage. That brings me to the third bullet point is we see, better nutrient partitioning. I mentioned that it shortens the inner node of the stock. So it's actually creating less stock. What do you really need stock for? You need it to hold up the ear and hold up the leaves. You don't need more stock than necessary. Otherwise, you're just kind of wasting those nutrients. If we make that stock smaller, what that actually does is it gives a larger proportion of its nutrition to the leaves and to the reproductive tissue. That's obviously going to be an advantage for higher grain yields. We see a lot of benefits to it. I think it's going to be a huge thing, in the near future.
Kathryn: 18:14Sure. And one thing that comes to mind with that thicker stock in combination with, I believe I've read and heard that the ear is then lower to the ground, right? With those two things in combination, does that make harvesting these a little bit trickier or have you guys not noticed much of a difference?
Sam: 18:32It definitely can. What we've noticed, especially in dry years when all the crop is shorter, that short corn is a lot shorter and especially below the ear. We've seen pretty low ears. I believe John Deere says if they can get it 18 inches above the ground, they'll be able to harvest it. But I know Bayer is really pushing for at least 24 inches off the ground, but it can definitely cause issues. There is ways that you can get around that. One is to plant maybe even a little bit later. We had one trial last year where we planted short corn, and then we had some demonstration plots in the field right next to it where we planted it really late because we wanted to delay some of our demonstrations. That short corn that we planted really late was about the same height as some of the tall corn. You wouldn't even be able to know the difference. If you delay that planting a little bit, you probably will increase that plant height, and be able to harvest it a little bit easier. The next one that we've seen is increased fertility. If you don't have enough fertility, then it's not going to be able to grow as big or as tall. If you have adequate fertility, then you'll be able to have a proper ear height and get it, where it needs to be.
Kathryn: 20:00Another kind of aspect of these hybrids is that they can be planted at much higher densities than traditional standard hybrids, right? That I think leads into what you've worked on with them, which is their root structure. And you have found, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but you have found that their root structure is essentially at least what you're seeing is what enables these higher densities within the the short corn. Correct?
Sam: 20:28Yeah. So that's what we've seen so far. We've seen very consistently across multiple experiments in tall corn. If you increase by 1,000 plants per acre, you have a two and a half percent decrease in root mass. That's not exactly what we saw for short corn.
Sam: 20:47Honestly, when we increased, it was a when we increased our plant population, we didn't see near the decrease in our root mass. It did decrease a little bit, but not nearly as much as the tall stature corn. This might be a nutrient partitioning advantage that I was talking about earlier. No less stalk, it's able to maintain those roots a little bit better. If you can maintain those roots, then you're going to be able to tolerate a higher stress, or a higher plant population stress. If we have the same or if we have more root mass on a per acre basis compared to, tall saturated corn that's probably going to be a win.
Kathryn: 21:36I've also read that short corn has similar yields to standard or traditional hybrids. And so my curiosity on that is, is it the same yields at the same populations? And then you can increase your yields by having those higher density populations? Or is it the same yield at those higher populations?
Kathryn: 21:58Does that make sense?
Sam: 21:59Yeah. We've seen that short corn really loves to be managed. The more you manage it, the higher the yield potential. If you increase population, if you feed it plenty of nitrogen or band your fertility, it can be about the same or maybe a little bit better in those high management systems.
Sam: 22:20At low density, what we've seen in your standard operation, it's about on par, maybe a few bushels less, but it's pretty consistent with the tall statured corn, which is honestly a compliment because this short statured hybrids haven't been developed nearly as long as those tall statured. You have this small window. I think in the near future, those short corn hybrids as when they start developing more, I could very easily see them out competing some of these tall statured hybrids.
Kathryn: 22:57So my one last question for you, Sam, related to that is, do you know when these are going to be commercially available?
Sam: 23:06Oh, I'd have to ask a Bayer rep to be a 100% sure.
Kathryn: 23:11I guess in general, are you thinking near term or long term?
Sam: 23:14It'll be near term. I know their groundbreakers program has allowed some of their farmer dealers to have short corn on their operations and kinda get to know it. And I believe in the next few years, I don't have a date on me, in two years, Jared says, in two years, we should be able to have commercial hybrids for short corn.
Kathryn: 23:38Great. That's super interesting. I think a lot of folks are very intrigued by them and want to learn as much as they can about it before they come out. I appreciate you sharing your knowledge on that and about your characterization of roots. That's also very, very interesting.
Kathryn: 23:56And I, as always, link resources in the episode description. So I will provide a link to your guys' website where folks can look at this research that you're doing and kind of look up more information as they would like. Jared, coming for you now. You talked about how you are doing a lot of strip tillage with the crop physiology lab. And with that, I wondered why the switch to strip till?
Kathryn: 24:25From what I understand, you guys, with your trials and what you're looking at, you've done a lot of conventional tillage in the past. So why this switch to strip till?
Jared: 24:36Conventional till is what I'm going to say probably 60% of our plots are actually. But for the last, oh, since I started ten years ago with Dr. Below, we've done a lot of banded fertility, a lot of concentrated fertility applications within the root zone. In the past, it had been in a conventional till system where we were kind of placing it four to six inches down. However, what happened actually for us to get into the strip till game was part availability for what our older toolbar was. We couldn't get parts anymore. Strip till was a new idea for us in the research world. We kind of grabbed onto it and started running with it. Then in 2022, sorry 2023, we got our first, strip till bar and started to work on it. Then 2024 was actually the first year that we had conducted strip till with fertility. Have to clarify the fertility part.
Jared: 25:31We did a strip till trial a few years ago, but it was just the tillage only effect. Now we're starting to look at the fertility and then also the tillage interaction.
Kathryn: 25:43What kinds of questions then are you trying to answer with these strip till trials and these strip till bi fertility trials?
Jared: 25:50The first one, the guys in the lab joke with me, I like to hit the ground running on a lot of new ideas and go full bore into them. In 2024, we put in the first trial, first strip till trial for our lab, where we looked at fall versus spring timing. We had a timing component of it. Then we also looked at three different types of strip till. We looked at kind of basically an idea of everybody's placement on the market, whether it was a Coulter machine, whether it was a Shank machine that's on the market or anything else.
Jared: 26:22We were trying to look at the whole idea of strip till, not just focus on one company's strategies or anything else. Then also compare it to the traditional conventional tillage or a no till. We had the tillage component, the timing component, but then we also had with and without fertility. We're looking at a three way interaction there just between, all those treatments within this trial. With that we were trying to figure out, at least in East Central Illinois, because we only did it in one location, is fall P and K through a Coulter the best for our high organic matter soils?
Jared: 26:59Or is the spring Shank applied down at eight inches deep with your fertility? Is that the best option for yield in 2024? We were just trying to figure out what timing was the best for us, and then also what tillage affect were we looking at that was getting the best yield in 2025 or 2024.
Kathryn: 27:19Okay. Can you talk about kind of in general what you found? I know in looking at your guys', your results, there's lots of different interactions. Just in general, were you finding that certain timings or certain placement of fertility, were they better or worse than others in comparison to, just conventional?
Jared: 27:40Yes. The main idea that I would like to say is strip till, what we're trying to prove here is that it's equal than or greater than conventional till. We're trying to prove that it's greater than, obviously, because that means everything works. We're also just trying to make sure that it's the same. That way, from an ROI standpoint, with strip till, you're doing your tillage pass, and then hopefully your nutrient pass at the same time saving money through that. What we found was that our yields were kept the same in 2024. However, in 2024, we had a pretty wet spring, and then we turned dry, during grain fill. We kind of had smaller kernel mass or kernel weights. We did see an increase on a lot of our spring applied fertility through this trial. And then the falls were, about equal to conventional till, largely because winter of '23 into spring of '24, we were really, really dry.
Jared: 28:43We didn't have a lot of snow. We didn't have a lot of rain. We actually really didn't freeze for a long time, so our soils were active. Applying fertility in the fall of '23 for 2024 growing season was not one of the best strategies that we had because our soils were still active. We tied up a lot of fertility.
Jared: 29:01The plant was not available or not able to get that nutrient eight months later after we applied it. That was one of the drawbacks we found in the first year. But a lot of our spring applied treatments, were an increase in yield for the first year of this trial.
Kathryn: 29:16Okay. You guys always have to work with the weather because you're doing true applied field work. You have lots of those unfortunate situations that come into play. Do you think in a more I don't know if you could even say this, but quote unquote standard year, would the results be flipped and where you would have kind of an opposite effect if, again, the weather was quote unquote standard?
Jared: 29:41Potentially there will be some cases just because there is different, just for my tillage trial alone with five different placements, one placement might favor the fall application time versus the strip till or conventional till may favor that. Because it's a five way split between all the tillage types, we might find one that prefers fall. We might find one that prefers spring. Not saying that it'll flip flop, but we are going to find ones that prefer different things. That's what we're trying to figure out is having those five tillage types, what are the preferred methods for that? And then we're trying to duplicate this trial this year. That way it's not just one year of data. That way we can actually say over two years, it was the same both years and trying to move forward from that.
Kathryn: 30:32Backing up a little bit, because I think we both have mentioned fertilizer placement a couple times. Just to be clear and kind of lay it out for those listening, can you describe the different types of fertilizer placements? We've talked about the equipment of strip till, but we haven't really identified and described how these different fertilizer placements differ within the soil.
Jared: 30:54Yes. So your broadcast application, would be having your co op come out and either spinner spread it or air box it onto the surface of the soil. And then, whether or not you leave it on there, that would be considered your no till broadcast, or conventional till where you stir it around a little bit, kind of move it deeper into the profile. That would be how we set up our conventional till fertility applications. And then when we move into the three strip till types, we have a Coulter applied, which would be kind of stirred around into a four to six inch deep area and about six inches wide.
Jared: 31:31That will obviously change depending on what equipment you have. But we like to, for our setup, we call it a six by six box. So we're spreading that fertility through six inches wide by six inches deep. And then as we start to move into our shank treatments for us, we have two different ones. One is a concentrated shank application that we call it, where wherever your shank is running, say eight inches or 10 inches down, we're gonna put 100% of that fertility. All your P and K about an inch above that. So it's not going to be spread throughout the profile or anything else. It is going to be concentrated all the way down at your tillage depth. So that would be, there's shanks on the market that working with that from like Kuhn Kraus or, Orthmann or everybody or some other people. Then we actually had a kind of in between treatment this year that was made to kind of copy some of our past banded research what we call the stratified shank. Tt's still the Shank tillage, but what we're doing is instead of concentrating all the way down at the bottom, we are cutting off our fertilizer delivery system at soil level. Then it's still being blown down into the trench from that knife, but it is not being funneled to the bottom anymore. The soil is filling in as the fertilizer is falling down into that void that the shank just made. So it's not a hot spot. It's kind of layered throughout that profile as that soil falls back in. That's why we call it the stratified shank is it's distributed for the most part down from two to eight inches, your tillage depth. So it's kind of the in between. It's less tillage than the coulter, but your fertility is spread throughout that tillage height.
Kathryn: 33:17Sure. And I know you were looking at kind of the effect on yield with these different applications. But you also, similar to Sam, we're looking at some effects on the root systems, right?
Jared: 33:30Yes. Sam got me all on the root train as well. He kind of influenced me on this with different tillage intensities, as we call it, we wanted to see how does that change your root structure, your mass, and everything else.
Jared: 33:45And what we actually found, in year one was obviously in the spring. When you fertilize in the spring, we were building the largest root mass out of the whole trial. About two and a half grams difference between fall with no fertility versus spring P and K. As you increased your fertility timing closer to when you were planting, you build a bigger root mass. That's what we found on the root mass side.
Jared: 34:11But then also one of the kind of interesting points about this trial when we were looking at root angle, sub note for this trial, this was all planted with a channel hybrid, one hybrid. So it was a static hybrid between every single treatment. That way we could actually pick out the differences between the tillage intensities. You would think that a concentrated shank, only having a shank run about an inch wide through your soil would build what we call a tomahawk root that would grow straight down because it would take the path of least resistance and grow straight down. However, what we saw was actually backwards.
Jared: 34:51The shank roots were growing wider, had more of an angle versus our Coulter or conventional tilled roots. Because from us, what we believe is that shank, that root that was growing on a shank strip was trying to search for that fertility and trying to grow wherever it could find it. It was putting on root mass in search of that fertility. Whereas our conventional tilled where we kind of stirred it around in that zero to four or five inch depth, it kind of grew and then it found what it needed and it stopped and it proliferated from there. Versus the shank where we concentrated it eight inches down, it had a long way to grow before it found all that P and K that we had just applied. We were looking at angle in this trial, and then we also, looked at, again, mass and surface area and everything else through that trial. The same thing that Sam was doing on his stuff we did in the strip till, just to quantify how our roots were changing depending on our tillage strategies.
Kathryn: 35:53Did you look at the affects that then had on yield? Because you would think that if the stratified shank where that fertility is kind of all throughout that narrow portion of the root zone, you would think that it gets that fertility immediately, and so you think it would maybe perform better. But then what you're talking about with the concentrated version where it's all in one spot and the roots had to grow out and down to find it, you would think that it took a little bit of time to get to that fertility, so maybe there was a negative effect there. But there's also that kind of conflicting positive effect of the fact that the root system is now larger and able to access more inherent nutrition within the soil. Were you able to like identify any kind of significant effects of either of those in the research?
Jared: 36:37Yes. One of our significant increases in the research world, as we call it, is, with a stratified shank in the spring. We gained, 13 bushels by applying our fertility in the spring versus in the fall with the stratified shanks. We saw a significant large increase for this trial by layering that P and K through the soil profile. How I'd like to describe it is kind of spoon feeding it. The roots would grow down, find some fertility. It would use that or it'd be tied up in the soil and then it could grow a little bit further down, find some more, and then a little bit further down, find some more versus a concentrated shank where it had to grow, you know, six inches straight down just to find a really hot pocket of that fertility that maybe it didn't like. The stratified shank in our year one of data did outperform concentrated shank, and then also outperformed the coulter. So we did see that stratified shank, same thing as what our roots had shown. We did see a significant increase on yield with that.
Kathryn: 37:42You did, a lot of this work in 2024, and you did it with one hybrid. Now in 2025, I believe you mentioned that you are now kind of mixing it up and throwing different hybrids at this situation. What have you found with that thus far?
Jared: 38:00We hit a hiccup in fall of '24. We were really dry, really, really dry. Couldn't do any strip till because a lot of people couldn't even get their toolbars in the ground. Then we turned wet and then we froze. We didn't get to do a fall timing in, fall of '24. We went to the drawing board, refound, or looked at some different things. Then, some of us thought of, well, let's add a hybrid component. Sam is over here talking about all these differing root structures and everything else. I talked about placement and tillage intensity. Let's bring it all together. We're bringing in a past, a variation of a past trial that we're still conducting that is, one of our public trials, the management yield potential trial, where we look at it's showcase of what each hybrid is doing on the market. I think we're up around 28 hybrids for this year, testing it at different treatments. But we took 16 different hybrids this year, three from Beck's, three from Bayer, three from Syngenta, and then two Agrifert LG hybrids in there. We're trying to classify based upon his, on Sam's SAM rating, trying to throw those into it and see, do these hybrids with a certain architecture prefer a placement method more than something else? Does a wide angle root really prefer stratified shank or concentrated shank?
Jared: 39:34Or does it really prefer conventional till? We're looking at that with 16 different hybrids trying to classify those for strip till because you and Sam had actually spoke about it earlier. One of the things about seed guys these days is that, they don't really talk about root structures. Sam hinted on it. Beck's is working on it.
Jared: 39:58They deal with horizontal and vertical. Syngenta just calls it strong roots. AgriGold calls it modified, or I think conventional is their opposite of modified. Then if you open up a Dekalb seed guide, they just give root strength. As a strip tiller, if I know where my fertility is being placed, I have really no idea which hybrid that I would like to grow based upon its root structure. That's where we're bringing that in is because Sam laid the ground foundation for this, and he's classifying each hybrid. Now I'm taking his data, picking the hybrids, and putting it into a placement trial so we can double check ourselves and make sure moving forward that we can say based upon his classification, we believe that these root structures should fit into this style of fertility placement, whether it be the three different types of strip till I was talking about or broadcast or even your standard conventional till, scenario for farmers.
Kathryn: 40:59That's really interesting. Do you think that the work that you do on that and the answers that you come up with, kind of what Sam had alluded to earlier with maybe they'll pick up on the SAM rating and use that across the board as selection for strip till and fertilizer placement. Is that something that could potentially in the future be reported for, hybrids going forward?
Jared: 41:21I believe so. It may not make it into the actual seed guide. However, they may start putting pressure on it to pick a few hybrids to suggest out there. Instead of growing top end yield hybrids that everybody's growing, like say, just for example, 6835 from DeKalb. Maybe 6835 doesn't perform well in a strip till, but it works for the conventional till guys. So maybe they need to grow say 6422, from DeKalb instead.
Jared: 41:48So that would be just a word-of-mouth suggestion that would be a good start for everybody. And then maybe five, ten years down the road, we might actually see the classifications in our seed guides to actually, you know, be full encompassing for every single grower. But allow the seed companies to do their homework and then put the best foot forward for that grower to pick his hybrid based upon what he's doing.
Kathryn: 42:13Right. Like I said in the beginning, I really love the work that you guys do. I think there's a million different questions that farmers have to ask themselves every year, and you guys are doing a lot of great work to help them answer those questions more easily and giving them the information that they need to make those decisions.
Kathryn: 42:30So I'm really appreciative of you guys joining me today and spending some time with me to talk to me about all of this really great research. And just before we end, one final question for both of you. What are the next steps of your guys' research going forward as you enter into the growing season of 2026?
Sam: 42:51Yeah, that's a great question. It's the more we learn, the more questions we have. Some of the things I didn't talk about is fertilizer timing. We're looking at in season application of nitrogen but then we start to think about if we need better timing for phosphorus and potassium too, maybe we should be doing that in season as well. Is there a difference within season fertilizer application based on root architecture. There's a lot of different things you could dive into. Maybe like continuous corn, is there a certain root type that prefers that? Or is it more of a genetic thing? There's just so many questions we can dive into. We're really excited for the the answers that we'll get this fall when when the combine goes through the field. Then we'll definitely have even more questions than we have now.
Jared: 43:53We've spent half an hour talking about corn roots and corn yield and everything else. I'll throw a curveball into it. I'm more excited for, soybean yields.
Kathryn: 44:02Okay.
Jared: 44:02We're actually taking the same trial that I was talking about earlier, the hybrid by tillage by placement, looking at strip till on soybeans. How do soybeans differ in their yield when placed on different placement strategies and also tillage intensities? We're also doing that on soybeans, looking at nine different varieties and how they respond. That being new and interesting for us, a new pathway for the lab, that's what I'm looking forward to for this fall. Then also building on it in 2026 to try and gain some traction on managing soybeans through strip till.
Kathryn: 44:38Awesome. And Jared, based on, planted acres, you might be the only person interested in soybeans right now.
Sam: 44:44Yes.
Jared: 44:46Yeah.
Kathryn: 44:47Well, hopefully, you'll have some really great information for when they come back into the the spotlight.
Jared: 44:52Yeah. I'm just trying to start the curve early.
Kathryn: 44:55Perfect. There you go. You're getting ahead of everybody. Thank you both again, Sam and Jared, for joining me.
Kathryn: 45:01I really appreciate it. And again, I will link your guys' lab information in the episode description so that folks can kind of plunk around on your guys' website to see some past research that you've done and look at hopefully when you guys publish your results from this year, folks can find that too. So again, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it.
Jared: 45:21Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.