Brent Rogers

Making it rain on a lot of our acres is getting to be a challenge as well, because we have a depleting water source that we're trying to conserve and save.

And so with doing that, we have to use less of it. That's the biggest challenge, is trying to figure out how to adapt and come up with new ways to do more with less.

 

Dusty Weis

Welcome to the FARMSMART Podcast presented by Nutrien Ag Solutions, where every month we're talking to sustainable agriculture experts from throughout the industry. As the leading source of insight for growers on evolving their sustainability practices while staying grounded and agronomic proof, FARMSMART is where sustainability meets opportunity.

We don't just talk change, we are out in the field helping you identify the products, practices and technologies that bring the future to your fields faster. I’m Dusty Weis.

 

Sally Flis

And I'm Dr. Sally Flis, Director of Sustainable Ag Programs, and we're joined today by Brent Rogers, one of our sustainable success champions from Double R Farms in Hoxie, Kansas. Thanks for joining us, Brent. I see you got your poster up in the back of your office there from our event this spring. Glad to have you join us on the podcast today.

 

Brent Rogers

Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be with you guys today. It's windy outside, so it's nice to be inside where it's quiet and can sit down and talk about sustainability and what we've been doing on our farm.

 

Sally Flis

Awesome. Brent, your reputation in the northern High Plains Division is that you're someone who is always on the cutting edge, always willing to try something new. And our Sustainable Success Champions program was launched to recognize and reward folks like you for making farming leaner and more sustainable and more profitable.

I'm sure you don't go out and look to be recognized for the work that you're doing on your farm, but what does it mean to have somebody recognize you for the years that you've put in to advancing sustainable ag on your acres?

 

Brent Rogers

Well, it's an honor, I’m definitely not doing all this to get glory and accolades. I'm trying to make my farm better. And certainly, you know, my neighbors and anybody that wants to listen and help the employees at Nutrien test some of these products and then see how they fit our area. I mean, we have a pretty unique area, so I think that helps a lot that we're able to test some of this stuff in limited irrigation and some of what we have going on in this area.

 

Dusty Weis

Brent, could you tell us a little bit about your farm? What are you guys growing? How many acres are you working and how long has your family been there?

 

Brent Rogers

Well, my dad actually owned the business that is now the Nutrien location in Hoxie. He sold out to UAP, which then became CPS and now Nutrien but anyway I've had a long relationship with that location and with a lot of those employees.

Went to school with Mark, been a lifelong friend, so we've had a good relationship and trust and whatnot for years. We farm in northeast of Hoxie, Kansas, were 30-ish miles east of Corby, Kansas. Kind of clear up in the corner of Kansas, we said on the Ogallala Aquifer. So we have irrigation, probably about a third of our farm is irrigation and the rest is dry land acres.

We custom farm a fair amount of acres for some neighbors and some bigger guys that don't have equipment. I think 1997 was my first year of farming. I took over for a neighbor that lived south of my grandpa and uncle. He was a bachelor and needed some help, and he was getting ready to quit as well. So I had to start over with using a little bit of his equipment, but I had to kind of start from scratch.

And at that point no-till was a thing but it wasn't a big thing in this area. So I decided I was going to start trying to be almost 100% no-till on all the acres that I was taking on, and bought a pull-type sprayer and started with that. We were able to get along real well with that, and basically it was no-till on every acre… except for the irrigated acres are treated all different, but on all the dryland acres been no till since ‘97.

In the last 4 to 5 years that's changed because of some challenges.

 

Dusty Weis

What sort of challenges?

 

Brent Rogers

Well, we've got, we call it bunch grass or pasture grass in our area. It looks like a real bushy ornamental grass you see in some planter beds in cities, kind of. Very, very tough to kill. We used to be able to kill it with a high dose of Roundup in its first few years we fought it.

Seems to creep in off of pasture edges more, so it'll get so bad that it'll take over a field. In our area we have a lot of pasture around us, so that affects us as well. But anyway, the only way we control it is tillage. I don't own any tillage equipment, I have never. So I have a neighbor that I've hired to do my tillage.

And on our dryland acres we're a third fallow, a third dryland corn and a third wheat. The wheat acres are harvested with a stripper head to try to save all the residue that we can. We spray those acres and they become dryland corn in that following spring. And then after it's harvested in that fall, then the following summer, it is fallowed that entire period and then drilled back to wheat.

So those acres, we pick them out every year. We've got roughly 700 and some acres this year that we're having worked. And it's just primarily to control that bunch grass. That, outside of pig weeds and the ability to not control them, I mean, it's becoming a problem.

 

Sally Flis

Brent, I haven't been to Kansas in a few years, but I've done that drive from Kansas City over to Kansas State University in Manhattan a few times in my career, and there's a lot of diversity across Kansas in landscape and rainfall and crops. You mentioned the challenge of this invasive weed species that's becoming a problem for you guys.

What are some of the other hurdles you guys have seen over time in raising crops in Kansas? You guys have been in this location a couple generations raising crops. So what things have changed and what new challenges have arose or what things have become better over the generations of farming in this area?

 

Brent Rogers

Mother nature is always the challenge. We average about 18in of moisture in our area. That's our average rainfall. Sometimes we get that in three rains and sometimes we get it in 50 point rains strong across the entire year. So you know, we can make it rain on some of our acres, but a lot of acres we can't. And making it rain on a lot of our acres is getting to be a challenge as well, because we have a depleting water source that we're trying to conserve and save.

And so with doing that, we have to use less of it. That's the biggest challenge, is trying to figure out how to adapt and come up with new ways to do more with less.

 

Dusty Weis

Yeah and I know you talked about your relationship to the local Nutrien Ag Solutions shop, starting with your dad and now your connection with Mark and Tyler, your crop consultants.

As you're working through some of those challenges and adapting to the changing conditions, how does that relationship come into play?

 

Brent Rogers

Yeah and I purchase 100% of what I use. Whether it's seed, fertility, chemistry is all came from Nutrien the last, well as long as I’ve farmed pretty much.

I mean, the seed part hasn't always been there, but I've switched to them ten years ago just because it was simple to have it all in-house. You can choose the varieties you wanted from different companies.

Anyway, long story short, yeah, we've been working with Premier Crop Systems out of Iowa for about five years now I believe. They do all of our scripts and analyze all of our yield data, and provide a nice notebook at the end of the growing season to compile our data from, whether it be by hybrid, by product, if we're using a certain in-furrow product or a two-by-two product, they just break it down to show us what hybrids and what products worked and how they worked on our acres.

It's a pretty slick program. They've been really great to work with, and they've worked real well with Nutrien as well. Been using John Deere equipment all my life. We adapted to the Ops Center early on. Everything we do evolves around the Ops center. All of our documentation, all of our everything.

And then that's linked in with the Nutrien employees. So they're able to look at that. Tyler is able to know exactly what I've got planted where, if he's walking through my field, he can call it up on the app and see it. So we sit down and have the meeting after harvest about the yields with Tyler, Mark and Premier Crop Systems.

We'll go over the yields. We'll look at you know if we had hail, do we need to throw that yield map out of our mix because it's going to skew our data. Weed pressure, I mean we spend 4 or 5 hours in the conference room at their location doing that.

And then we order seed generally during that time or as we're doing that for the following year, you know, for the upcoming crop year and place hybrids based upon some of that, what we've seen.

And we have another meeting in February after the hybrids have been placed and we discuss what populations we want to put them at in those zones and some of those zones have changed.

And those zones are soil sampled after we have that fall meeting Mark will soil sample based off of those zones. And then we base our nutrients and our seed and everything off of that compiled map that we've put together.

 

Sally Flis

So, Brent, your comments there go into an area that I think we've touched on on every podcast, and that's data and data management and how you're using that on the farm. And so two-part question here. One, how is your data collection evolved over time? And kind of where did you come from before?

And two, as growers are trying to figure out what is the data collection platform they want to use and what they want to collect for data, what would be your number one recommendation for where to start in that journey of data collection and management?

 

Brent Rogers

I guess I would say in my journey, we always collected it every year, but not everybody was on the same page as far as collecting it. So at the end of the season, we'd have an operator that maybe forgot to change the field ID, you know? So we always had the data, but we had to go back and do a lot of work to clean it up.

And sometimes it was a pain in the butt. But as we've progressed on, the Deere system has made it simpler. I mean, when you pull into a field, it asks you if this is the field you are at and if you want to be there.

I still post calibrate everything after harvest, but I just did that wheat here about a month ago and it was off, not a lot at all. Just the evolution of technology has made it simpler.

I've got a guy that's working for me now, been with me for, I think going on two years. I've kind of turned this data part over to him. He runs the sprayer and the combine. He's doing a lot of the cleanup and making sure we wrote every field we farm, custom and owner-operate with a ranger and mapped the borders of every field.

And that is the next step. I mean, you're going to have to have that for automation going forward. But it's changed our farm a lot and every field has a boundary around it now. And every pivot corner has a boundary compared to the pivot.

So we have a lot less accidents and mistakes. And that is really been a good thing. And those boundaries were driven with RTK, so they're perfect.

 

Dusty Weis

So building on that with the data, the data cleaning, one of the comments that we've heard from our staff in your area is that your farm is the highest quality on-farm research that's happening in the northern high Plains area.

How does that make you feel to hear that you’ve got that kind of reputation out there?

 

Brent Rogers

Well, it makes me feel good. But you know, I've spent train loads of money on GPS equipment and mapping equipment over my farming career, and we were doing that in the beginning, and I just felt that this is where we needed to get to, and documentation is not going to magically do it for you, but it makes doing these tests very simple.

I mean, if you've got the kind of the Ops Center and the equipment we've got that’s set up to do it. We put a product called Propulse on a lot of acres, and we have injection systems on both our planners. And it's just very simple to document a lot of these kind of trials. And I don't mind doing it because it's easy to do the way we're set up.

 

Dusty Weis

Getting a bit of a reputation Brent, the staff in writing out the application for your sustainable success champions recognition here. They described you as fearless. And when we look over this list as some of the practices that you've tried out there, I'm not seeing a single cutting edge practice that you haven't tried out. There's some really cool stuff here, so we kind of want to crack the hood and take a little deeper of a look at some of the specifics of what you've tried, what's worked and what's not, and what we can learn from it.

And we're going to do that here after the break. Coming up in a moment on the FARMSMART Podcast.

 

Dusty Weis

This is the FARMSMART Podcast presented by Nutrien Ag Solutions. I'm Dusty Weis, along with Sally Flis, and we're talking today with Brent Rogers from Double R Farms in Kansas, one of Nutrien Ag Solutions’ Sustainable Success Champions who we are really pumped to learn more about here.

 

Sally Flis

Brent, over time you've adopted a lot of new practices to optimize soil health and yield and improve nutrient management, water use efficiency, control weeds. What's your favorite one that you've added over this time period as you've added practices?

 

Brent Rogers

Well, not so much practices, products. I mean, we started using BLACK LABEL/BLACKMAX. I mean, BLACK LABEL was the first product, we started using that the first year you guys started carrying it.

Got a little saying “Black in the tank, money in the bank.” I mean, we've been using Black products forever. And when it first came out, a lot of producers struggled with it because one, they couldn't see their little balls floating in their red balls, couldn't tell what was going on.

I worked with Blaine Ginther at SureFire at the time, now SurePoint out of Atwood. They're owned by Deere, but you got to have the right application equipment to deliver those products. And we were fortunate enough to start a new planter build in 2012 with the right delivery system on it.

And that's the key to the Black products. If you've got the right way to deliver them. On our dryland acres, we've been using two gallons of BLACK LABEL in two by two for 7 or 8 years and just love what we see with the products.

So from that standpoint, we've been doing a lot with products, more so than changing anything drastically on our farming practices. But lots of BORON, lots of micronutrients. We're doing lots of stuff with newer products.

 

Sally Flis

So when you use the products like the BLACKMAX or the BLACK LABEL products, what are the outcomes you're seeing? Yield, water use efficiency, nutrient use efficiency, kind of what are you seeing across the board in those measurable outcomes in the data sets that you have?

 

Brent Rogers

Like I said, we've cut out 10-34-0 on our dryland. I mean, we put some on with a drill in our wheat rotation, but in dryland acres, we haven't used 10-34-0 extensively for 7 or 8 years. Our soils have lots of 10-34-0 trapped in the P2. So there's lots of it below us, we just can't extract it.

And we found that the BLACK LABEL and the black products have helped do that. So we're able to mine some of that from the lower levels. And honestly, we haven't seen those lower levels degrade removing the 10-34-0, and using the black products. When we started using the black products, that was our goal was to try to, you know, our P2 numbers in some fields are crazy.

So we just felt like every time we put 10-34-0 on all we were doing was building that P2 level and not utilizing it at all. So that's been the biggest thing we've done. And then we've cut our nitrogen use back to be part of this program and to be part of some of these sustainability programs. We've cut our nitrogen used by 5%.

I think we've seen the black products help make up some of the gap there as well. But if you don't have the equipment to apply it correctly, you're going to struggle with it. Because it's a different mindset. You know, not being able to see the red balls is the biggest thing. And I mean, every piece of equipment you use it in, the water in it's going to be black for ten years.

It's just an incredible product. But we’ve got along really well with it and it's just in everything we use.

 

Dusty Weis

Brent, you were talking a minute ago about mining that Phos out of your soils and you’d mentioned earlier in our discussion that you’re using soil samples. But what are the practices around that? How are you going about measuring and monitoring those Phos levels across the farm?

 

Brent Rogers

One of the guys that works for me soil samples all of our dryland acres yearly. We'll be sampling the acres that are going to wheat here in late September in the next week or two. We don't do a grid sample on those acres. We just do kind of a composite sample on those. On our irrigated acres, they get sampled every year by Nutrien.

Generally, it's Mark. Christine in the past and she may still do it. She makes the zones for him to take out to map off of, but they're again compiled through our premier crop data tied in with our ops center yield data. Those zones are made and then Mark goes out and samples those areas. You know, typically we sit down in that after harvest meeting and that's when we discuss…

This year the biggest discussion was budget because you know we're under water right now.

We're below breakeven. So we've tried really hard to stick to a budget and we apply our fertilizer, my dad was a placement guy. He always wanted you to place your fertilizer, whether it be two by two, in furrow. He wasn't a big fan of spread and dry fertilizer on a field and just letting it lay out there, I mean, he would do it.

So I've always been a placement guy. So we've always applied all of our fertilizer on our dryland with our planters in a two by two setup. We put it all on next to the seed, on our irrigated corn we’ll strip till all of our irrigated acres, put about a third to half of the needs on with the strip-till rig.

Generally quite a bit of the phosphorus needs that BLACK LABELs and stuff. We do use force on our irrigated crops because they use a tremendous amount of it. But put that on, then we'll come back and put some more two by two on with a planter. And then the last five years we have been fertigating the remainder of the needs on.

So we'll put it through the pivot. And if it's corn following beans, it gets generally one less application because the beans have left behind some nitrogen.

 

Dusty Weis

Are you using any techniques in season to monitor nutrient needs before you make those fertigation applications?

 

Brent Rogers

Yes. Sap sampling extensively. I mean, the last two seasons, we wait for the sap samples to get back before we build that shot of whatever we're going to put on.

Sulfur, boron, and nitrogen are the main three that we always have. But there's REAX COMPLETE, I mean, the list of stuff we're using. One of the challenges we're having with that is some of these products we’re using, I wouldn't say they don't mix well together, but in a fertigation setup, you know, if you're putting it on through the pivot and you're putting an inch water on, it takes five days for that to get around.

So that product sits in the tank for five days at the well, while it's being injected into the water system. So agitation is one thing we've had to do, and that's not a challenge, but it is, so to speak, because we use a cone bottom trailer from Nutrien that sets there and it's got a gas motor on and it'll agitate it, but it runs out of gas in about two hours.

So we've had some failures, so to speak. We've put some blends together that looked really nice on paper, but didn't want to go through the chemigation system because they didn't like each other setting there for five days.

 

Sally Flis

Brent, in addition to these advanced 4R nutrient stewardship practices that you're implementing on the farm for monitoring things like phosphorus and nitrogen and micronutrients, you are also implementing technologies like See & Spray from John Deere or drones for your scouting. What is the decision when you look at adding things like a See & Spray or drone scouting to your management practices on the farm.

 

Brent Rogers

The See & Spray we're in our second season of that and oh, game changer. It's unreal. We have a lot of fallow acres. So we went with the single tank option that Deere has. We figured the first application, I think we did about 1800 acres of fallow last summer. We saved roughly $27,000 on that first shot across there, with just chemical savings over what we would have used if we had used that same tank mix and solid sprayed all those 1800 acres.

So when we saw that, we were blown away. I mean, it was going to pay for itself in almost the first application with it. So we typically treat our fallow acres 3 to 4 times during the summer. So, you know, you can do the math on what the savings look like.

But also, you know, some of the species of weeds we’re having trouble controlling and such as the Pitt/Palmer/Pigweed, we've been able to tank mix some different chemistries that won’t cost a lot more but are very effective.

And you know, when you're not treating that entire acre or that entire field, you can make those chemistries make more sense and get a better kill.

Also, we've went to the Taranis. We're in second season of Taranis scouting on not all of our irrigated acres. I think maybe two thirds of them. Biggest takeaway from that is the maps for seed populations after the crop’s been seeded or planted. It's unreal what that thing can see.

And we're variable rating all of our seeding maps. So typically, if you didn't know what that area was supposed to be planted at, and you went out there and you looked in all the low areas and you came back and you'd say, man, cabbage population’s not very good.

The Taranis map almost overlays what our seeding map was looking like. You know, we know when we have a problem based off comparing those two maps, whether we've got some issues or not.

 

Dusty Weis

Very cool.

So, Brent, to pivot a little bit, we know that you're not just trying new things on the farm, you're also out in the community taking a leadership role on some of these topics.

We understand that you've served on the Kansas Corn Commission and the Northwest Kansas Groundwater Board, you were the president of Kansas Corn, and you were involved with US Grains Council. That’s a lot of work when it’s all tallied up. Why is it so important to you to take this leadership role, and how has it made a difference for you and the community around you?

 

Brent Rogers

A lot of people don't understand what checkoff dollars go towards, and a lot of people feel like they're a waste and that they're upset. They think they're wasting dollars. And until you get involved in one of these organizations, this Kansas Corn Growers Association is what I was involved with. But soybeans, wheat, they all have their organizations. I've been to DC probably 5 or 6 times on behalf of corn growers in Kansas and around the nation.

And a lot of what we saw come out of that big, beautiful bill for farmers, like it or hate it, the corn growers played a major role in asking for that policy and helping develop that policy. And those checkoff dollars did that. I mean, those checkoff dollars got those people to DC and got them in the meetings that they needed to be in to tell our story and to let DC officials know what's really happening on the ground in rural America and what growers need and what the problems are.

So you don't see that until you're involved in it. And I just got back from Michigan, there was a US Grains Council meeting. I serve on the sustainability committee with them. Exports are record right now. A lot of people are upset because the corn markets and the markets are not good, but we're exporting record amounts right now. So we just have a big crop coming.

And I think that's going to weigh on us.

 

Sally Flis

Brent, one of my favorite parts of our Sustainable Success Champions event at Commodity Classic is getting the growers and crop consultants together from across the country to talk about the challenges and wins that they're having in their sustainability journey and in cropping. You joined us this year in Denver for Commodity Classic to receive your award and to celebrate all the winners of our Sustainable Success Champions Awards.

How was that experience and what were some of the takeaways you had from being at that event with us in Denver this year?

 

Brent Rogers

Well, Commodity Classic is a yearly event for me because of Corn. It's a wonderful show. I was so glad to have it in Denver because it was closer to home. Felt like we tried to get some of the local guys that generally wouldn't be able to go to a San Antonio, Texas or somewhere like that to go and experience it because… you get the cutting edge, so to speak, at that show.

You don't get that anywhere else. You get to see the latest and greatest products and some of the stuff that just isn't at your local farm show in terms of who you can see at those. We had a great time. I think that's the show that these companies and producers need to attend. It's a good time of year.

It's in the dead of winter for most everybody. There's going to come a day when I don't have to be there because of Corn, and I'm still going to go because it's just a great, great show. Lots of educational stuff, from marketing to products to generally the Secretary of Ag speaks to us on, you know, how things look in Washington.

You cover a lot of angles of that show.

 

Dusty Weis

Brent, we've heard you talk about these new ag practices, your participation in some of these groups across the industry, and all that stuff. It’s a lot more work to always be growing and evolving like that. What keeps you motivated and hungry to be on the cutting edge?

 

Brent Rogers

Well, I did hit on this just earlier, but you know, I also sat on the Ground Water Management District Board. Was president for several terms there. We've implemented lots and lots of water cutbacks and water savings things here. We're getting ready to cut the entire district another 15% starting in 2026.

So when we started that process, it was tough. I had a big red arrow on my back, and I had lots of people point fingers at me and tell me I was no good and I was doing the wrong thing, and it was tough. But here we are now, ten years later, and we've all learned through the process that in a lot of cases we were using too much water.

I wouldn't say we were wasting it, but we weren't using it efficiently.

Technology has played a huge role in saving water an area, whether it be the AgSense units that are on the end of the pivot that allow you to control the pivot. If we needed to put a half inch of water on a pivot to water in some chemical that we just applied the day before, start that pivot when you go home, you know, based off the timer settings, that it's going to get done in a certain amount of time.

Well, that might finish at 2:00 in the morning and nobody was coming out at 2:00 in the morning and shutting it off. They'd wait till the next morning and that pivot would run an extra, you know, six, eight, ten hours, whatever it be.

So with that AgSense unit, you could set it to shut it off when it completed that circle automatically. You don't have to be there. Spread that across a lot of operations, with a lot of acres, that adds up to a lot of savings. And then the Drought Guard seeds really came in the last ten years, and we've got some varieties that can use less water and really strive in a tough, tough environment.

And then the infancy of the autonomous pivot and soil moisture probes. So we're tying all that together with the seed fertility, the right amount of water, and knowing how much moisture is in our profile, and then tying that in even more with future weather forecast for the next ten days.

And it's all one big picture that comes together and Mark and myself and everybody, we’re kind of constantly looking at the apps that we have that control all that and trying to dial it in.

 

Dusty Weis

Well, I'll tell you what, Brent. One thing that I love about agriculture, about talking to growers and operations like yours, is that working in this field sort of forces you to take a big picture view on things. I mean, you talk about being on the Ogallala Aquifer, and that's not just your water, that's your neighbor's water. That's the source for the towns and cities nearby.

And by taking a leadership role on these issues, like you have, by making practice changes like you have by making the hard choice, you've helped preserve that resource for the next generation. And that's exactly the kind of thing that we try to celebrate here with our Sustainable Success Champions program. So we thank you for everything that you've done.

We thank you as well for taking the time to join us here and share some insights into your practices. Brent Rogers from Double R Farms in Hoxie, Kansas. We appreciate you joining us for this episode of the FARMSMART Podcast.

And that is going to conclude this episode of The FARMSMART Podcast. New episodes arrive every month, so make sure you subscribe to The FARMSMART Podcast in your favorite app and visit (nutrienagsolutions.com/FARMSMART) to learn more.

The FARMSMART Podcast is brought to you by Nutrien Ag Solutions, with editing by Emily Kaysinger.

And the FARMSMART Podcast is produced by Podcamp Media, branded podcast production for businesses. podcampmedia.com.

For Sally Flis from Nutrien Ag Solutions, I’m Dusty Weis, thanks for listening.