By Wendell Owens

Wendell Owens operates International Ag Labs in Fairmont, Minnesota with his partner, Dan Skow. In addition to that, he’s a full-time almost farmer as well.

I had the pleasure of visiting his farm earlier this year, and he’s growing both conventional and organic soybeans and corn. His farm is nothing short of spectacular.

He is going to share what he has learned regarding foliar feeding. So many of the presentations so far in the Conference have been soils up, as they should be. But once the crop is in motion there are still things you can do to still influence it—its yield and quality.

He’s taken the foliar feeding lessons of Carey Rheims, taken them to a new level. He has promised he’ll hold nothing back and is going to tell you everything he knows that can fit in one hour, which is a contradiction already. Please welcome Wendell Owens.

Thank you, Fred. It is an honor to be invited to speak at the ACRES Convention. I’ve always enjoyed all of the meetings I’ve been to. I think I’ve been to every one since 1986. I really enjoy being down here. It’s kind of like a family reunion.

My wife gave me some instructions before I left. She told me not to say anything witty, funny, or intelligent. So she said, just be yourself, so here I am. (laughter) Nah, she didn’t really say that. She’s a nice lady.

Anyway, I hope what we cover here today will be something each one of you can take home and use in your local operation.

First of all, I want to clarify some things. We’re not really talking about soil programs here. We’re talking about a crop and I want you to get a mindset that we’re actually working with the crop. Foliar feeding does not replace the soil program. If you go about that with that mindset that we’re dealing strictly with the crop then I think probably you’ll be able to follow along a little better.

We’re going to look at about three different facets of foliar feeding. We’re going to talk about what is a crop reaction to foliar feeding. What is the mode of action taking place within a plant from foliar feeding. What is the end result.

Crop reaction is a command to that crop. Whatever nutrients we put together in this foliar feeding program, we are telling that crop to do something. If you look at the flyer there, we’ve got growth elements. We’ve got potassium, calcium chloride, and nitrate nitrogen on one side. We’ve got phosphorous, (amoniacle?) magnesium, trace elements. Any manure teas, compost teas, anything of that nature would be going under the seed producing elements as well. If you’re using any of those products you would be putting those under the seed producing element.

When we’re looking at these elements there is one special element in this whole scenario that I want you to remember through this whole presentation, and that’s phosphate. We’re talking about phosphate and the role that it takes in a foliar program.

Dr. Rheims taught this. He taught that every foliar program should have some phoshoric acid in it, and he also taught that you cannot foliar feed calcium. That was the end of the subject as far as he was concerned. Now Dr. Rheims never told us why. He never really told us the whys and wheres and whats. We followed his teachings but there were a lot of unanswered questions that he left us with. This one with phosphorous we found out fairly early.

Phosphorous is the element that makes the engine run. You can take a lake and you can put all kind of elements in it. If it doesn’t have phosphorous or phosphate these other elements do not go to work and start an algae bloom, because phosphate is what puts that whole thing in motion. If you don’t have that phosphate there you won’t have the algae bloom.

If you take out all the other elements—we’re talking impossibility—but if you took all the other elements, lets take deionized water and put phosphate in it you won’t have an algae bloom, but when you put the two things together, and I’m talking any other element with phosphate, you’re going to get an algae bloom. That’s because the phosphate is the engine that makes this whole thing run, and any foliar spray that does not have phosphate in it is not going to give the mobility of the elements. It’s not going to make this thing run. It’s just like putting a match to a bonfire. It’s what really gets the thing going. It’s the spark that ignites the whole system.

So, we’ve got growth elements over here, and I’m sure Dr. Skow probably talked about some of those this morning. We’ve got potassium, calcium, chloride, and nitrate nitrogen. All those work really well except one, and when you take calcium and mix it with phosphorous—I don’t know if you’ve ever done this before, but if you have you probably wouldn’t do it the second time, because you can get a lot of cheese, and believe me, we’ve made a lot of cheese in our day. We’ve done a lot of experimenting with this.

When we look back at this, this is why Dr. Rheims said that calcium could never be foliar sprayed, because it could never be mixed with phosphorous. Or phosphate.

So this has been our goal and our dream for years that we could put these two products together. Sometimes you’re too dumb to know any better. Well, I’ve been told that, and it probably was, but we kept trying. We’ve been able in our laboratory to be able to put those two things together and I’ll talk about that a little later.

Leafy crop.

Now we’re going to grow grass. We don’t want seed, we want grass. So we’re going to go over here and look at these elements, but there is one special element we still need over here—we still need a phosphate.

Had a guy from Michigan who was a grass dairyman, and he was having problems with his pastures. I said, “Well, the thing of choice on a pasture is calcium nitrate in your area. I knew he was low on calcium in his soils. One of the things of choice would be calcium nitrate. Spread dry calcium nitrate out there. Potassium nitrate is alright, but that’s too high priced, so we’re going to use calcium nitrate on that pasture. He says, Why?

I said, nitrate is a growth promoter, and Calcium is a growth promoter. What you want is lush green grass. We’re going to grow foliage, so we’re going to go with calcium nitrate. If you put urea on it’s going to make your grass go to seed. He got quiet and he says, “That’s what happened.”

I said, what? He said, “Last year my coop came out and sprayed urea on my pasture and my pasture all went to seed. Just kind of settled out and do a lot after that.”

Urea is ammoniacal nitrogen. It’ll make grass go to seed. So calcium nitrate would be something we would want to use on grass. Well, we’re still going to look at that soil program and still have to remember we’ve got to have phosphorous in there and keep that going.

We’re going to raise corn. We’re looking at a seed crop, so we’re looking at the other side of the spectrum there. We’re looking at the phosphorouses. We need potassium, but we also need the seed producing time of the year when the torn flowers and pollinates. We have to have that.

Growth, Flowering/seed producing, Growth

Actually a corn plant goes through three different phases. We go through a growth phase so we want to go on the growth side. We want to go through the seed producing side during the flowering side, and then when it bulks we’re going to go onto the growth side again.

In 1992 we sent two people. They went 80 miles each side of our town of Fairmont, and they pulled soil samples. We put a flag in a cornfield. It was all done in corn fields. Put a flag down and every week they pulled a core out about that far down the row, so we were sampling the exact same area every week.

The potassium levels started out here. The corn started to grow fast. Potassium levels went down. The corn started to produce seed. The potassium levels went up. On August 13^th, all the cornfields in the country started producing bulk in the seed. Potassium went in the tank. As it filled the potassium level came back up.

Potassium was the one element that really showed the true thing. Now phosphorus—we had a lot of phosphoruses dipping down during the seed producing time. The things that surprised me was that before you thought it was happening the plant was starting to draw these things.

This has nothing to do with foliar feeding, which just proves my point. This was done at the University of Missouri and it’s talking about grass tetany in cattle. All I’m trying to prove here is, the results of this study are consistent with early reports from this research group with both wheat and tall fescue indicating the key nutrition was a critical factor in increasing leaf magnesium and calcium concentrate.

Okay. Grass tetany is a magnesium deficiency, so what did they have to do? They had to put the P on, or the phosphate on to get the magnesium available into the plant. That’s what I am proving a point here that this phosphorus just has to be there.

We’re looking at this foliar program and we’ve always got phosphorous in that foliar program. I guess we’ve pushed that enough now. We’ll go on to the next slide.

One thing about foliars: we’ve got three different types of solutions that we’re working with. We’ve got what we call a true solution. You can hold it up. It’s just like a glass of water. You can look right through it and there’s no waves in it. It’s totally clear. That’s a true solution.

Then we have an emulsion. It looks fairly clear until you hold it up to a light then you’ll see saves going through it. These are elements that are chemically separated. They’re not totally into a solution. So that’s the second kind.

The third kind that a lot of guys are trying to spray are what we call suspensions, or wettable powders. To me a wettable powder or suspension—I’m not saying we’re not going to get a result from it, because we’ve gotten results from a lot of things I didn’t think we’d get results from. But to get something that was consistent.

This is the thing that has always bugged me about foliar feeding—the consistency of it. We’ve never been able to get consistency. Until we started really studying these things: how it gets into the plant. One time we’d have great results and the next time we’d have a bomb.

So two years ago I really started taking Dr. Rheims’ information that I had on his foliar feeding and trying to expand on it and get some insight into why he taught what he did—why he said we couldn’t get calcium in through a leaf and all of these things.

But these three kinds of solutions—as far as I’m concerned there is only one kind of solution that is a foliar program, and that is the true solution. You may get some results out of an emulsion, but you do not have that bond with phosphates that you should have to get it into the plant.

I don’t usually do this—I don’t usually talk about a product, but I have to do this, because the only way you’re going to know what a product is going to do is to know about the product. You’ve got to know what’s in the product, why it’s in there, and what’s going on here.

This is a product that we put together and it’s got calcium in it, and it’s got phosphorous in it. It’s a 5/16/4. It’s a true solution.

We’re going to take a look at this. We’ve got 5% nitrogen up there. 4% of that is nitrate, and 1% of it is ammoniacal. Then we’ve got 16% phosphate, 4% potash, and 5% calcium.

I want you to remember these numbers, because the next slide we go to we’re going to tell you what makes this program work. So we’ll go to the next slide, but remember those numbers. Especially we’ve got to remember the two kinds of nitrogen that we’ve got in there.

Now I am going to the mode of action of how this thing is going to take place. We’ve got to have a negative solution, so we’ve got a 4%nitrate nitrogen which is negative. We’ve got 1% ammoniacal which is positive. We’ve got 16% phosphate which is negative. We’ve got 4% potassium which is positive, and we’ve got 5% calcium which is positive. Now you add those up and see what you get.

You get 20 units of negative energy and you get 10 units of positive energy. That’s a very very critical thing in foliar spray. We’re looking at a leaf surface here. (a bon here and a bottom, this is a tomato, and this is the bottom of the leav?). When you’re working with foliar sprays you’re working with a (flowum?) A plant has two circulatory systems. You’ve got a (zylum?) and you’ve got a flowum.

When you put something on the leaf it goes into the leaf, and it goes down the flowum. The flowum takes things from the leaf, the zylum takes things from the root. So we’re mainly working with the flowum, and when you foliar feed, the foliar product that you’ve got phosphorus in there, it gives them mobility. It goes into the flowum. It will go down to what we call a (sinks?). Now the sinks are the fruit or the root.

If you’ve got an alfalfa plant out there or grass, you’ve got only one sink and that’s the root. If you’ve got an apple tree with apples on it you’ve got a lot of sinks. You’ve got the apples and the root.

What we’re doing is going from the leaf to the sinks. Hopefully, the part of the solution that gets down to the root will turn around and some of it will make its way back up to the zylum.

Mainly what we’re looking at is this flowum and the circulatory system of the flowum. So we spray this foliar spray onto the leaf and she’ll go into the flowum. It’ll go down to the sinks and we can have an effect on the fruit or the root, whatever we want to do.

When we go down into the root on forages the forages end up making better quality in that forage. We’re actually working for a quality forage, a quality apple. We’ve looking for quality whatever, and this has a real effect on this.

Our next slide is going to create some controversy. Here is where I and Dr. Rheims have parted company in the last two years. I’ve always been taught that a foliar feed goes through the stumata. We’ve always tried to get these things on the bottom of the leaf so they go they go through the stumata.

Now, you put a leaf under a microscope and put a drop of water on a stumata and these guard cells will close right up. When I first saw that, I thought this isn’t right. It doesn’t make sense. This is not common sense. If that’s where all of our nutrients are going in at, why does that close up?

That was probably the biggest shock I’ve done with all these foliar feeds. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not fed through the stumata.

This is why we talked about the positives and the negatives. Inside that leaf we’ve got a positively charged hydrogen ion. We have to get this through the cuticle of that leaf, not the stumata. The stumata is on the bottom side of the leaf. We get CO2 coming out of the soil, goes into that stumata. That’s the breathing apparatus of the plant. We’re taking her in. That’s what that stumata is doing.

I know there are many people out there who have been in the foliar feeding business for years, and they’re going to say this guy is crazy. And this is the way I see it, and I just—if you don’t believe me get yourself a high powered microscope, find yourself a stumata, put a drop of water on it and watch it close. And it will close. So my conclusion is that we’ve got to get this through the cuticle or the outside of the leaf.

Some plants are easier to foliar feed than others.

You take a milkweed or some people have a rubber tree in their house. You’ve got a really thick leaf, and a really thick cuticle. Very hard plant to get anything through the leaf, through the cuticle.

Milkweeds are kind of hard to kill in the field with spray simply because you can’t get it into the plant.

Now we go back to that foliar spray. We have 20 units of negative energy and 10 units of positive energy.

Dr. Skow talked about this this morning. We’ve got a positive and we’ve got a negative. What happens when you put those two together? They go together. Okay. This is what we’re after. This Is why we’ve got 20 units of negative energy and that (a Amaze?) product. Simply to overpower this positive energy that we’ve got, and you’ve got to do that to foliar spray and to have a consistency.

I’ve got a little demonstration here if I can make it work. I’ve got a couple of cow magnets. See? There’s two positives going together. (positive magnets repel!) We’re spraying potassium nitrate. We’ve got 9 units of nitrate nitrogen which is negative, but we’ve got 11 units of calcium that’s positive, so we’ve got more positives than we’ve got negative.

Look what’s happening here. We’ve got two positives working together. That’s just like putting hay in the wrong end of a cow. It doesn’t work. We turn it around and put it—I’m not saying that this foliar spray has got that strong a magnetism, but that magnetism does exist there. And we want that to go together.

I’m not saying that we don’t use spreader stickers, because we do. With this particular product we like to use dextrose. One of the best spreader stickers that we’ve found so far. I’m not saying that a good spreader sticker doesn’t work, but if you do use a spreader sticker you use a non-ionic, so you do not change the charge of that product.

The other thing we found out about foliar sprays is, we do not want the pH of the whole solution to go over 5. We want to have an acid solution. So this is what we’re looking at.

We’ve tried to spray calcium nitrate. We’ve had results with it. Why did we get results with it? I guess I can’t answer that. From my theories of what we’ve got here is that if you don’t have phosphorous with that calcium nitrate it doesn’t work. It must have gotten washed off the plant and gone through the soil. I don’t know. I know that 9/18/9.

You take 9/18/9 and you figure that out. The first thing you’ve got to know is the first 9. Where did it come from? If it came from urea then it’s all positive so we’ve got to wash there. We’ve got 18 units of positive. We’ve got 18 units of negative. I’ve seen 9/18/9 sprayed on alfalfa and I’ve seen a result. I don’t think it was through the foliage.

I’ve seen many different things sprayed, and worked. I really can’t explain how that happened, but I really, really believe that if you’re going to have consistent results in a foliar spray you’re going to have to have more negative energy than positive energy. If you’re actually, truly foliar spraying.

We have worked with all kinds of different concoctions, but when we come down to it we’ve got to have that negative energy.

Now, we’ll go back to 9/18/9. If we’ve got ammonium nitrate, then we’ve got a little bit more negative energy than positive, so there is a possibility, but I think it may work with ammonium nitrate, but you do not have the attraction you’ve got. You want to remember in the Amaze we’ve got. You want to remember in the Amaze, we had 20 negative units. We had twice as many negative units as we had positive units.

The Amaze that we had up there—what do you think that is? Do you think that’s a growth element? Or do you think it’s a seed-producing element? What do we want to put it on? What do we want to use it for? Are we actually promoting seed production with that product or are we promoting growth and bulking with that? That is a growth bulking product. Simply because we’ve got calcium, potassium, nitrate nitrogen. That is a growth promoter.

Now, if I wanted to put a seed producer in there. Let’s say I want seed production—that’s it. What would I use?

I would use a good grade of map which would be a soluble grade would be 12/61/0. That’s 12% ammoniacal nitrogen which is a seed producer, but it’s got a humongous negative charge to it. And it’s phosphorus is a seed producer. We’re going to go out here and try and create flowers on something. We’ve got a tomato plant that’s all going to vines. We’ll put MAP on it. Put a little apple cider vinegar in there with it and you’ll have flowers like you can’t believe. That’s one thing we can use to make seed production.

Phosphorous and ammoniacal nitrogen (MAP). Works great for seed production. This product I was talking about we use it on an apple tree. We use it after the apples are on. We spray it probably seven times during the development of the apple. We can raise the calcium levels of the apple. We’ve made better cell structure. We’ve done this on tomatoes where we bulked the tomatoes during the bulking time. We’ve got customers that got premiums on the tomatoes because they can take their tomatoes, put them in a can. The cells will stay together. They can can them and we’ll end up—they get a premium. Their neighbor’s tomatoes go for tomato paste. Simply got a better cell.

You have a cell that’s made out of calcium it’s better than a cell made out of potassium. You get a sweeter flavor. These are some of the end results.

We get higher sugar levels when we go with this type of a program. We get better cell structure. We get higher protein, higher calcium, higher relative feed values. Higher digestible fiber in alfalfa. People who are selling dairy grade alfalfa use this on their alfalfa. It’s a bulker. If we’re looking at a corn plant we can start out with a product like this as a foliar spray and we can go to a MAP or apple cider vinegar to produce seed.

I do this with irrigators. We’ll put on a growth program, then we’ll put on a seed program, and we’ll start that about after the crop is up about 40 days we’ll start with a seed program. Then we’ll go back to a growth program again or a bulking program I guess you’d call it at that time.

The key thing that we’re looking at is phosphorus makes the engine run. We’ve got calcium that can be mixed with phosphorus if it’s done right, but if you can’t do that you better be sure you’ve got plenty of calcium in your soil.

Calcium is a very very important thing for good soil health, but we’re not talking about soil health here. We’re talking about plant health, but it’s also very important in plant health.

You’ll get less insect pressure. You’ve heard about the shoemaker’s kids that don’t have shoes. Well, my wife raises potatoes every year, and of course, I never get it sprayed with what should be done. This year I made up my mind I was going to get my potatoes sprayed the way they are supposed to be sprayed. We had a lot of grasshopper problem this year, and I was out there and about every week or week and a half I’d go up there with my hand sprayer and douse those potatoes.

There were grasshoppers all the way around there, and they really didn’t bother those potatoes. Now, I know you probably think that’s far fetched, but I’ve also seen that in a corn field where the insects didn’t bother the corn simply because of the program that was on that corn field compared to a neighbor’s corn that was 30 inches away.

I learned that in 1998. I’ve been told that and didn’t believe it until I saw it. Maybe you won’t believe it until you see it, but it actually will happen. If you’ve got the sugar levels up in that plant you won’t have the pressure from insects.

We had probably the best potato crop we ever had, and my wife couldn’t believe. We’ve had blight off these potatoes every year. Maybe the 15^th of July the potatoes would start turning brown and we’d end up getting our little bee-bees out from under there, and this year we got potatoes running out our ears, so it really did a good number on them.

If a salesman comes and he sells you some foliar spray and if you can’t look through that foliar spray and he’s not going to tell you how much ammoniacal nitrogen or nitrate nitrogen, and you look at that and you just do your math on that thing. If you know what’s positive and negative.

On that one slide there I had—you can get kind of fancy there. Molybdenum Oxide was in there. Well, Molybdenum Oxide is a dry product. It doesn’t dissolve very well. It’s negative charge, but it doesn’t work very well.

Sound:

I really can’t comment on sound. I’ve not done my homework on it so I probably shouldn’t be commenting on it. I can’t tell whether it’s good or bad because I haven’t done any research on it. I kind of know what the basics behind using the bird sounds makes everyone feel better.

You know yourself, when you come into a room and we’ve got nice fresh air and everything is right, you feel better. So I can’t disclaim that at all, and if those sounds make plants feel better I am all for it. But I haven’t really done my research on it.

Will this spray keep corn borers away?

I have not done enough research on corn to be able to comment. We have worked on I would say yes, but I want to qualify that. If you’re got a rotten soil program it’s probably not going to do enough.

The key thing for any insect on any plant is a brix level of 12 or above. If you got a brix level of 12 or above you’re probably not going to have a problem. Now, I’ve got to quality that, because I’m going to get all kinds of telephone calls. I know Doc talked about brix levels this morning, and brix is a great thing to use, but there’s one thing you’ve got to do is use it during the same time every day—probably about 2 pm. You’ve got to look at the weather situation.

If you’ve got a sunshiny day and it’s been sunshiny—pro9bably 48 hours, you probably should go out and brix test. If it quit raining—you had a 4-day rain, and it quit raining at 6 in the morning and you went out there at 2 pm the brix level is going to be in the tank. I’ll guaranty it. Then I’m going to get a phone call saying, “Hey, my brix level is in the tank.” This is one of the hardest things to do is keep the brix level up during cloudy, rainy weather. It’s just plain natural for it to go down.

Refractometers are a great tool, but they drive guys like me crazy because guys like me get on it and get carried because my brix has fallen in the tank and what am I going to do? If you just wait 12 hours or so it’ll probably be back.

Maybe you’ll have to do some correction too. Keep watching it.

If you pick your harvest during a rain you’re picking poor quality fruit. I’m going to read you an article here. Grazing animals prefer afternoon hay. If you want your livestock to eat more and gain more weight then make hay while the afternoon sun shines.

Scientists with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service say a new study shows that sheep, goats, and cattle all prefer grass hays harvested in the afternoon compared with those cut during the morning. One possible explanation is that plants’ carbohydrate production is at its peak at mid-day. The hay is easier for animals to digest, and gives them more energy.

Other studies show animals can be conditioned to choose higher energy feeds. It’s long been known that livestock grazing tends to peek in the afternoon. This led researchers to explore whether cutting hay later in the day could boost consumption.

Scientists let the animals try afternoon-cut hay and morning cut hay, being offered both in a side-by-side comparison. Sheep, goats, and cattle all consumed an average of 50% more of the preferred hays. The preference held true even though the hay was from harvests on three different days.

The scientists also conducted the study, and also noted the livestock top picks among the afternoon hays to make sure that cutting time was the key factor in determining preference. Each hay underwent 15 comparisons in the scientific evaluation.

It makes sense that animals eat more of a better hay. Sugar levels—our laboratory, if you send a 4H test into our laboratory you’ll get a sugar level back on that test. The sugar level is going to be a direct result of the soil program that you’ve got and the foliar program that you put together on that crop.

The first time this was really brought home to me was a couple years ago. A lady in Maryland was raising timothy hay for race horses. She called us up and she said, we have a problem out here. As soon as my hay is bailed, we had been doing her soil programs for about 4-5 years. (Have to back up a little bit) She said, as soon as my hay is bailed race horse people come in and take it right off the end of the field, and I never have to put it in the barn. My neighbors see this, and they say, “You’ve got a tremendous marketing program. Would you sell our hay for us?” She told them she didn’t have a marketing program. What’s going on? We’ve sent this hay to labs. It’s no different. You send it to our lab. And we’ll see if we can find a difference.

Her neighbor’s hay had 1.12% salt. We also do a salt test on it. Her hay had .4% salt in it. Salt retains water. This horse probably had 15# of water in him when he was living on that salty hay. More than the one that was on the lower salt hay. The sugar level in her hay was 48, and this is a sugar index. It’s not a percent or PPM. It’s a test we developed in our lab. And as far as I know we’re the only ones that do it. The neighbor’s was 30.

So we had a horse that had 15# more water and was living on almost half as much sugar in its hay compared to one that was probably 15# lighter and had twice as much energy in her hay. The only thing selling her hay was a stop watch. It was perfectly simple. Those guys were picking it up. The horse was running faster on that lady’s hay. That was her marketing program.

“Oh,” she says. “I just raised the price of my hay. Heck with the neighbors.”

So, this actually happened, and we have been really criticized for talking about sugars in hay. We’ve been criticized by the academic community and a lot of people, but I’ll stick with that till my dying day. If you’ve got twice as much sugar in this hay as you have in this hay, and you feed it to a dairy cow—if you’ve got a 50 sugar index compared to 25 sugar index you’ve got 10# more milk per day and every other number on that sheet can be the same.

Q about salt blocks(?)

Dr. Rheims used to teach that they use salt drop(?) phosphate in lime. The only thing I will say about that—you should have a soil test. Depending on the amounts you put on we found out that the heavy amounts that Dr. Rheims used in Georgia and Florida didn’t work in the Midwest where we had calcarious soils. We still used the product but we used it in different amounts and different ways. But that definitely would raise the sugar levels of your plants.

I would say garden produce is always better picked in the afternoon because the sugar levels are going to be up in the afternoon.

What is the difference between morning and afternoon? I don’t know if I can answer that precisely, but there is quite a difference. You’ve got to remember when you’re in the forenoon and got dew on the plants, you remember what I told you about rainy cloudy weather lowering the sugar level? During the night the sugar level goes down in the plant. During the day it comes up. If you’re asking for a specific number I don’t know that I can give you a specific number. I do know I’ve had enough calls from people—if I don’t tell them to do it the same time during the day at 2 p.m. they’ll go out at 2 p.m. one day, they’ll go out at 8 a.m. the next. And their sugar level is in the tank and I’ll get a telephone call. So that’s why I tell you to do it the same time every day.

Foliar spray in the morning and pick in the afternoon.

That is another thing I’ve found. We don’t foliar spray in the forenoon when there is a lot of dew on. Spray in the afternoon, or in the evening, but not when there is a lot of dew on. I neglected to say that, but this is something else we have checked into.

The amount of water—it really doesn’t make any difference. We want 20 gallons minimum. Your maximum can go anywhere. But the more water you put with a solution the more you’ve got to be checking the pH. We want the pH at about 5 of the total solution, and if you’ve got water that’s 8 and you’re pouring in 100 gallons to 200 gallons to the acre you’re going to have to acidify that water.

But if you’ve got 20 gallons to the acre, and you put AAmaze with it you don’t have to worry about it. That pH is not going to be over 5. But this is something you really have to pay attention to. But the amount of water we want a minimum. We really don’t have a maximum.

Q: Whether temperature makes any difference.

Some of the best—I used to think that was the case. I think probably humidity has more to do with it than temperature. I like to have a fairly decent humidity. If it’s 100 degrees and you’ve got 10% humidity and you’ve got a 40 mph wind, stay in the house. But if you’ve got 90 degree temperature and 60-70% humidity and it’s a good spray day I would have no problem going out and spraying. But definitely you want to have a little humidity there.

Is there any business to using food grade vs. regular or fertilizer grade?

Absolutely. The best quality product you can buy should be used in a foliar program. This brings up another subject.

Only orthophosphate goes into a plant.

I can remember going out and foliar spraying 10/30/40. I sprayed my whole farm with 10/30/40 foliar spray one year. Polyphosphate. The only type of phosphate that will go into a plant is orthophosphate. So, this is another thing you’ve got to find out about your foliar spray. If they so not have orthophosphate in there it’s not a good foliar spray. If they’ve got polyphosphate in there—check that.

If you’ve got orthophosphate it is a good foliar program. If they’ve got polyphosphate it’s not. The plant can only take in orthophosphate. Polyphosphate has to be changed over to ortho in the ground before it can come into a plant.

(Q)

Well, you’re getting into an emulsion. The question is soft rock put into water and sprayed on. We’re getting into an emulsion, and it’s just common sense, if a plant has a grain of fertilizer laying on the leaf, I’m not going to say that none of it is going to get in there, but to me, I’m a very simple thinker. Any time you’ve got a suspension and you’re trying to get it through—if you put it through a filter it’s going to filter it out and we’ve got a filter it’s going to go through. So we’ve got to have a clear solution as far as I’m concerned for a good foliar spray.

Colorado potato beetle. If you keep the brix level on a potato at above 12, and 12 is a shady area. If you’ve got it at 14 I’d be very surprised if you’d have Colorado potato beetle.

You could get CPB after four or five days of cloudy, wet weather when the sugar levels go down. They could come in and you might have to spray for them. We worked for a large potato farm in Wisconsin and I don’t remember the exact numbers, but they were spraying $350M per year in pesticides. I’m not going to say they never sprayed a pesticide, but it was something like $60M they ended up spending for the year. It was tremendously different.

Simply, the only time they had to do it was when weather conditions were not conducive to high sugar levels. Most of the CPB damage was on the outside five or six rows. Really, didn’t have much of a problem with them.

Phosphorous is the key to bring sugar up in conjunction with other elements. Whatever you’re trying to do. We use molasses, or dextrose is the best form of sugar for a sticker, and this is research from Cambridge University, and they compared dextrose to glucose. Different types of sugars. They compared different oils, and this is what they called bio-surfactants that were more or less organic. They found out dextrose was the best form of sugar. They found out olive oil is the best oil, and I probably can’t afford to use it, but that’s what they found out was the best oil.

Calcium 24—Haven’t used it.

Q Is irrigating a plot considered foliar spraying—sprinkle irrigation. We have used this principle in our programs. The thing we do in an irrigation—the problem we’ve got is acidifying the water. But we’ve used these principles in sprinkle irrigation. We’ve used the growth promotants, the seed promotants. Then we’ve used the bulking of the growth promotants again in a corn situation, for instance. I do not think if I was going to put 2 quarts to the acre on of a product that is a foliar spray I think I would put it on with a sprayer. Or, if they’ve got these little fruit trees, they use the minimum amount of water. I think it would work in a situation like 6that, but when you’re putting on an inch or two of water, I really don’t think that is a viable thing as far as foliar spraying.

We do use the principle—the growth—seed—growth principle in our fertilizer mixes.

She asked where they get AAmaze from and I don’t like to talk about a product. The only way could do that—that’s the only foliar spray I know from the bottom up. Because we built it. People ask me about other foliar sprays and if they’re going to tell me how it’s built from the bottom up I can tell you if it’s going to work or not. But you can stop in at our booth and talk to some of us afterwards.

Q Do we have one that is strictly a seed promotant foliar spray. No. We don’t have a certain seed-producing spray. We probably could develop it. I said in my talk that probably MAP 1261O would probably be a good seed producer along with apple cider vinegar. There are lots of other things we could do to get seed promote also. But that’s just something you can buy in the open market.

When you get a real fine mist you’ve going to get a better coverage, so. You’ve still got to have that negative to positive to get your better coverage. The more of that leaf that you cover—even if you cover the underside of it—you’re going to get better coverage.

Q was is the size of the droplet have an effect. I would say the finer the droplet the better the foliar spray, definitely. You’re going to have better coverage.

I want to thank you for your attention and your time. You’ve been a good audience.