Renewable Farming

Brazil’s Spraytec launches a mineral/biological “kit” for corn, soybeans

Spraytec’s fertility product assembles several of the firm’s biological and nutrient blends into a four-part “kit” that showed encouraging response in Midwest corn and soybean field trials during the 2019 season.

February 21, 2020Spraytec is a Brazilian firm with years of agronomic experience under difficult South American growing conditions. One of the firm’s specialties is using phosphite in their blends along with highly available forms of NPK and micronutrients. The company has established a North American headquarters in Urbana, Iowa. Spraytec field rep Drew Ewing sent us a couple of field check results from use of the new product, labeled as “Impulse.”

The image below has convinced several innovative farmers, and some would-be dealers for Spraytec products, to promote “Impulse” this season. The dealers’ retail pricing may vary, but Drew tells us first-year retail from his dealers is somewhere in the range of $12 to $16 per acre. With USDA projecting a 2020 marketing season cash average for corn at $3.80 per bushel, that would take about a 4-bu. gain to break even, assuming a foliar application could be tank-mixed with another foliar spray product you’d need anyway.

Update March 9, 2020: Our Renewable Farming team met with Spraytec Territory Sales Managers Drew Ewing and Renato Firmento here at the early March Hawkeye Farm Show, and discussed details of the new Impulse product. Drew proposed that Renewable Farming should retail Impulse to our WakeUP customers. In fact, after this web report was posted Feb. 21, some of our customers also asked if we can make it available to them, alongside their WakeUP orders. So — that’s what we’re doing.

In keeping with our effort to help our customers hold down costs, we’ll offer the product this season at $10 per acre, plus shipping. But shipping should be relatively modest, as one box of product can foliar-feed 100 acres. Spraytec promises that we’ll have deliverable product available by the end of March. Spraytec’s first shipment from Brazil to the U.S. (over 100 pallets) was immediately snapped up by Midwest growers.  

For information or orders, call Erik (319-610-2506) or Jeanene Carlson (319-610-5239). Today, one of our visiting farmer clients ordered 600 acres worth of Impulse, saying, “With performance like that showed in early trials, I can afford to take the chance on a few acres.”

We also will encourage our growers to run some strips with WakeUP in the mix with Impulse, compared to Impulse without WakeUP. Since many of the ingredients in Impulse are trace elements and biostimulants, we’d expect that WakeUP as surfactant / penetrant / internal mobilizer will bump up the yield response profitably. 

The single cornfield result sent us by Drew Ewing (yield monitor map at right) showed a 95-bu. response over the untreated check. The field is near Moorland, IA, and the foliar application of Impulse Corn was made at V5.

The bottom section of the field was foliar-fed at V10 with another Spraytec product, Fulltec Cube. That section of the field averaged 235 bu. — a gain of 50 bushels over the untreated check.   Also, scroll down and view the cornfield shown at the bottom of this report. Corn in the left half of the photo shows untreated rows. Corn in the right right half was foliar-fed with Impulse Corn at V5.

These are not random-rep results — but the sharp delineation evident in the field, and the extreme yield differences, indicate that the yield monitor was recording treatment response, not soil variations alone. One of our innovative WakeUP users texted us this image and said, “I think Impulse is worth trying in 2020.”  

Naturally, our interest in this new combination treatment is: Will our WakeUP surfactant/leaf cleanser/penetrant increase crop response to Impulse even more?  With micronutrient blends that typically enhance yields 5 bu., tank-mixing 5 ounces of WakeUP adds another 3 to 4 bu. by improving absorption, translocation and metabolism of the mineral nutrients.

Usually, a single application of foliar nutrients and biologicals nudge corn yields less than 10 bu. per acre. Repeated applications through the season can keep corn filling later in the season, and add 40 to 60 bushels. That’s economical given a per-acre product cost under $10, but a single-application 5-bu. to 10-bu. gain is very difficult to confirm as a significant unless you have several replicated strips and a well-calibrated yield monitor or weigh wagon. Our website has a simple field strip test procedure to use, adapted from Practical Farmers of Iowa. Visit this link.

Impulse treated beans on left

Drew Ewing also sent us some soybean data from a test field near Clarion, IA. Untreated soybeans on 20 acres yielded 51 bu. per acre. The 60 acres foliar-fed with Impulse Soy yielded 66 bu. per acre — a 15-bu. gain. Visually, the height differences during pod formation were also substantially different, as shown in the soybean photo at left.

 

Taller corn on the right was foliar-treated with Spraytec Impulse at the five-leaf stage.

 

Ear samples from grated and untreated rows