Control What You Can Control

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Welcome back to the EZ Ag Podcast, where innovative farming meets practical solutions. I'm your host, Matt Long.

Over the last couple of months, we've spent a lot of time talking about what's happening in the crop right now. We've talked about nutrient demand, water use, the importance of continuing to scout, and managing the crop as we try to protect the yield potential we spent all winter and spring building. That has certainly been reflected in what we've been doing in the field.

We've been busy scouting, evaluating fertility needs, looking at disease pressure and fungicide decisions, dealing with insects and spider mites, and trying to make good irrigation and crop management decisions through some pretty difficult conditions.

But there's obviously another side to the story this year, particularly when we look at our dryland acres. It's been an extremely difficult summer.

In most fields, drought and prolonged periods of extreme heat have taken a toll. And there are fields where a lot of the yield potential we started the season with simply isn't there anymore.

When you spend all winter planning a crop, investing in getting it established correctly, and then watch Mother Nature take away that potential, it's pretty difficult to find much positive in that situation.

But I think this is actually a really important time to pause and go back to one of the fundamental ideas behind the Max Yield System: We have to focus our management on the variables we can control.

That doesn't mean the variables outside of our control aren't important. Obviously, rainfall and temperatures can have a bigger influence on yield than almost anything else we do. But because we can't control them, our job is to build a production system around the decisions we can control.

That means making good decisions when conditions are favorable, adapting when conditions change, protecting our investment when we have the opportunity, and recognizing when additional investment no longer makes sense.

And as we move toward the end of this growing season, I think there's another piece of that philosophy that becomes important. We need to take what 2026 is teaching us and start using it to build 2027.

With a name like the Max Yield System, I think it's pretty easy to assume that the goal is simply to keep adding inputs in pursuit of more bushels.

But that's really not what we're trying to accomplish. The goal is to maximize the return on the dollars we're investing by making those investments where and when they have the greatest opportunity to influence production.

At the beginning of the season, we're trying to create as much realistic yield potential as we can.

We start by understanding the soil and building a fertility plan around what the soil can provide. We select hybrids and populations that fit the environment. We focus on planter performance, seed placement, and establishing a uniform stand.

Once that crop emerges, the focus begins to shift. Instead of simply building potential, now we're managing and protecting the potential we created. That's where scouting becomes so important because the plan we put together during the winter should never prevent us from responding to what's actually happening in the field.

And I think this year provides a really good example of why that matters.

On many of our irrigated acres, we still have significant yield potential because that opportunity is still there. We've continued evaluating fertility, fungicide, insecticide, miticide, irrigation, and other management decisions.

We're not making those applications simply because they were written into the plan six months ago. We're making them because we believe there is enough yield potential remaining for those investments to generate a return.

On many of our dryland acres, that calculation has changed dramatically.

There may have been products or applications included in the original plan that made perfect sense when we planted the crop. But when drought and heat remove all or most of the yield potential, continuing to make every planned application simply because it was part of the original program doesn't make sense.

And that's an important distinction.

Sometimes maximizing ROI means making another application because there is yield potential worth protecting. Other times, maximizing ROI means recognizing that the opportunity is no longer there and keeping that money in your pocket.

That's why I really think of the Max Yield System as a decision-making system. We build a plan, but then we continually evaluate that plan against the crop in front of us.

That brings us to something I think is going to be especially important as we move toward harvest.

We have to be careful not to judge every decision we make this year solely by the final number that comes across the yield monitor. Yield obviously matters. Ultimately, that's what we're trying to produce.

But yield is also the result of everything that happened to that crop, including a lot of things we have absolutely no control over.

So when we have a field that doesn't yield what we hoped it would, simply saying, "Well, that program didn't work," doesn't teach us very much.

Instead, we need to break the season apart and ask what happened along the way.

Did we establish the stand we wanted? Did we achieve that uniform emergence? Did our hybrid fit the field and handle the stresses we experienced? Were the nutrients we applied available when the plant needed them? Did we identify disease, insect, or mite pressure early enough to make a good decision?

Then we can start looking at the economics of the decisions we made after planting.

Where we made another investment, did that investment protect yield enough to generate a return? Where we chose not to make an application because the potential had already been lost, did that decision protect dollars that otherwise would have been spent without a realistic opportunity for return?

Those questions give us a much better picture of how our management system performed than simply looking at the final yield.

And that matters because if we don't separate the quality of our decisions from the circumstances outside our control, we run the risk of throwing away good management practices because Mother Nature gave us a bad year.

On the other hand, we don't want to excuse poor decisions simply because conditions were difficult either. The goal is to honestly evaluate both: What did Mother Nature determine, and what did our management influence?

Once we start separating those two things, even a difficult year can provide information that can help us improve.

And we don't have to wait until the combine rolls to start gathering that information.

One of the reasons scouting is still important late in the season is because the crop is showing us things right now that may be much harder to identify once the field has been harvested.

When you're walking fields, pay attention to where the crop handled stress better and where it struggled first.

If one part of the field stayed productive longer than another, ask why. Maybe it relates to water-holding capacity or fertility. Maybe it's soil structure or compaction. Maybe it's population or hybrid placement.

Most likely, it's some combination of several factors. The important thing is that we start asking the question.

The same is true when we're comparing hybrids.

We can look at which hybrids maintained plant health through the heat, which pollinated successfully, which are maintaining stalk quality, where we're seeing disease development, and how different genetics responded to the environment they were grown in.

Also look at management differences.

Maybe we have strips where we changed a fertility treatment, used a biological product, made a foliar application, or approached the crop differently in some other way.

Rather than simply asking whether one treatment looks greener, we need to think about what that treatment actually did for the plant.

Did it improve nutrient availability? Did it help the plant maintain function under stress? Did it protect yield potential? And eventually, did the response generate enough additional production to create a return on the investment?

Those observations start giving us a list of things we want to investigate further after harvest.

And that's why I would argue the 2027 crop has already started.

We often think next year's crop starts sometime this winter when we sit down and start talking about seed, fertilizer, and crop plans. But the information we're going to use to make those decisions is being generated right now.

So before harvest, take some notes. Take pictures. Dig up some roots. Look at ears and stalks. Compare hybrids and treatments. Mark areas of the field that you want to come back to.

Then, when the combine gets into those fields, we can start connecting what we observed during the growing season with what the yield monitor tells us.

If an area struggled all summer and the yield map confirms it, now we have something to investigate. If another part of the field consistently performed better, we should be just as interested in understanding why.

And that's where soil sampling becomes such an important part of the conversation.

Instead of simply pulling a soil sample because it's something we do every few years, we can use soil testing to answer questions that came out of the growing season.

Why does this part of the field consistently outperform that? Are we dealing with a fertility limitation, a pH issue, differences in organic matter, or differences in nutrient availability? What is actually happening underneath the crop that might explain what we're seeing above the ground?

That's the idea behind our Get the Dirt on Your Soil program.

When we talk about soil testing, we're trying to move beyond simply looking at a piece of paper and asking how many pounds of nitrogen or phosphorus we need to apply.

Those numbers are important, but they're only part of the story. We want to better understand the environment we're asking the crop to grow in.

What nutrients are already present in the soil? Which of those nutrients are actually available to the plant? What limitations might be preventing the crop from accessing them? What role are organic matter and biological activity playing in nutrient cycling and nutrient availability?

Ultimately, we want to understand how the soil is functioning so we can make better decisions about where our fertilizer dollars need to go.

Because if we're talking about maximizing ROI, the answer isn't automatically adding more fertilizer.

The better question is: How do we get the greatest production response from the fertility investment we're making?

Sometimes that means supplying a nutrient that's deficient. Sometimes it means changing the timing of an application so the nutrient is available closer to when the crop needs it. And sometimes it means improving the soil environment or biological activity so we can make better use of the nutrients that are already there.

That's where soil health, nutrient availability, crop resiliency, and yield really start to become part of the same conversation.

And that's exactly the conversation we're going to continue at our Field Day on August 18 this year.

At the Field Day, we'll be focusing on how yield is built from the ground up.

And I think that really captures what we're trying to accomplish in the Max Yield System.

Yield isn't something we create with one product or application. It's the result of a series of decisions that build on each other throughout the season.

It starts with the ground.

We need to understand our soil, our fertility, nutrient availability, biological activity, and the environment we're asking the crop to grow in.

Then we have to take that information and manage the plant. We select the right hybrid and population. We establish the stand. We manage nutrition and water. We scout for disease and insects. We manage stress and continue adjusting our plan based on the potential we have in front of us.

And eventually, all of those decisions come together in yield.

And that's really the progression we're going to spend time talking about at the Field Day: first the ground, then the plant, and ultimately the yield.

We'll spend some time walking through the Max Yield System and show how those different management decisions fit together.

We'll talk about our Get the Dirt on Your Soil program and how we're using soil testing to better understand fertility, soil health, and nutrient availability and, ultimately, make better management decisions.

And I'm also really excited that we'll be joined by Michael Thornton from AgriGro.

Michael is going to spend some time talking about AgriGro and NutriBolt products, but more importantly, how those technologies fit into the bigger picture of soil health, crop resiliency, nutrient availability, and maximizing production.

Because that's the conversation I want growers to walk away with.

We don't want to look at soil testing over here, fertility over there, and biologicals somewhere else. Those are all tools we're using to manage the same biological system.

And the opportunity is in understanding how those pieces work together.

When we understand that better, we can become more intentional about where we're investing our money and what we're asking that investment to accomplish.

So, control what you can.

As we finish out 2026, I think that's probably the message I want growers to remember the most.

This hasn't been the year we hoped for everywhere. There are fields where Mother Nature took away potential despite a lot of good decisions being made along the way.

We can't change that. But that doesn't mean we can't make progress.

We can finish this crop by continuing to make good decisions where opportunities remain. We can protect our investments where there is yield worth protecting, and we can avoid throwing additional money at fields where the opportunity has already been lost.

At the same time, we can start evaluating what the season has taught us.

We can identify what worked, what didn't, and what we still don't completely understand.

We can use our observations from the field, our soil testing, and eventually our yield data to start answering those questions. And then we take those answers and build the next plan.

That's how I think we need to define progress in a year like this.

The Max Yield System isn't about chasing the highest possible yield at any cost. It's about continually improving the decisions we make around the variables we can control and using those decisions to maximize both production and return on investment.

Some years, Mother Nature gives us the opportunity to push the upper end of what we think a field can produce.

Other years, the win might simply be protecting our investment, learning something valuable, and positioning ourselves to do a better job the next time around.

Both are part of the process.

So I'd encourage you to join us on August 18 for our Field Day and "Yield: Built From the Ground Up."

Come take a look at what we're seeing, ask questions, hear from Michael, and learn more about the Max Yield System.

But more than anything, let's use it as an opportunity to start thinking about what's next.

Because while we're still finishing the 2026 crop, we're already gathering the information that will help us build 2027.

We can't control every variable Mother Nature throws at us, but we can control what we do next.

Thanks for tuning in today. And remember, ag is easy when you tune in to the EZ Ag Podcast.

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