Colby Woods

The Micro Nutrient guide had over 100 requests in the first 20 ish hours. I feel this is a telling story- people are hungry for knowledge- dedicated to being the best at their craft - and people are understanding it’s a system approach to managing- not just more N,P,K. Learn together and grow together. Next Levels saying from day one of opening the doors has been : Bring the best in agronomics and balance it with economics. With Agronomy 365 and the team - this system has been growing strong all over the US. Thank you

Got a tip from my good friend Mr cropcast, @sean_nettleton to paste the link instead nextlevelag.com/resources/ hoping this works better.

A lot of people are looking at next year's numbers right now and thinking about trimming fertility. I get it. I'd be thinking the same thing. Here's the thing though. Cutting back is easy. Anybody can write a smaller check. Cutting back with confidence is a different deal. That takes knowing what your ground is actually holding, field by field, and what the crop actually hauled off this year. So before you cut, ask yourself one question. Do I know which acres can take it and which ones can't? If you're not sure, that's okay. Most of us aren't. Ask your retailer what data is behind their recommendation. And ask them if they use Next Level Ag.

Building soil P is expensive. The math and the field don’t agree. Just jumped in the combine helping the family farm . Bean yields around here have been pretty good. Can’t speak for everybody, but overall solid. Quality’s a little off. I was listening to a video saying phosphorus needs to be 50 ppm, preferably 100. We just finished a field that made over 60. Around here most APHs are 43 to 45. Mother Nature gets the credit. She did the work. That field tested 3 to 10 ppm phosphorus. Do you really believe another 10, 12, 15 bushel was sitting there just because the soil test number was higher? I ran the math with Grok on building this ground to 50. 11-52-0 at $1,152 a ton is $1.11 a pound of P₂O₅. University data (Iowa State, Minnesota, SDSU, Tri-State) says it takes about 16 to 20 pounds of P₂O₅ to move a Mehlich-3 test 1 ppm. From 5 ppm to 50, that’s roughly $900 an acre on paper. At pH 7.2, calcium ties a lot of that up. Figure 40 percent fixation and you’re closer to $1,500 an acre before you even count crop removal working against you every year. Then ask how many bushels that takes to break even. Chasing that ppm, I’d go broke — or I’d be better off buying more land. We foliar fed this field several times. No check strip, so I can’t prove it paid. I believe it did. Exudation drives phosphorus uptake, stimulation and plant health drives exudation. The more you stimulate the crop, the more phosphorus gets in the plant. - both are important soil P and Uptake. Can’t spend it all just to get it applied to the soil. I’m not anti-phosphorus. I want P in the field. I’m anti-losing money chasing a magical ppm. South Dakota cash beans are about $12.40 tonight. At that price, $1,200 an acre is 97 bushels. $2,000 is 161 bushels. Spread over five years, you need an extra 19 to 32 bushel every single year just to get your money back. Not once. Every year.

Next Level and Agronomy 365 is always looking to get better, we are releasing our grain analysis test with seed count to better understand what your farm and management is doing for you. 1) Grain Analysis + Seed Weight sets the base of understanding your removal rates 2) Indicator Complete/Max determines the estimated release rates and what the soil can provide for free 3) Baseline recommendations are created by filling the gap (what is needed for yield goal - what the soil can release All in house data driven to create efficiency on your farm.

The standards most use for the base of a nutrient plan is just a guess based off of averages. Your grain is the only real receipt. This is one field. One grower, one 2026 corn crop, six zones. Not a regional average — just what this field actually did. Nitrogen ran 26% under the book. Phosphate 18% under. Potash 7% over. Sulfur 6% over. Same hybrid family, same field, and phosphate removal still swung from 53 to 80 pounds per acre. So the question isn’t whether the book is wrong. It’s whether you’ve ever checked yours. 1) Removal is only one piece of the puzzle. 2) The next step is the soil test — what percent of that need your soil already covers naturally. 3) The prescription file makes up the difference. That gap is all you should be spending on a crop. Grain analysis tells you what it takes to create the bushel. Soil tells you what’s already there. The prescription closes the gap. This is one field. Let’s find out what yours says. Send grain. We’ll show you what actually left.

1 ounce runs the pounds. A boron-short corn plant can look almost finished in the leaves and still fail to set an ear. That was the finding of a 2011 maize study by Lordkaew, Dell, Jamjod and Rerkasem. Vegetative dry weight barely moved. Hand-pollinated boron-deficient plants made 0.4 kernels per ear. The plants with boron made 410. When they crossed them, good pollen on boron-short silk made almost no grain. The silk was the bottleneck. The common line that boron is “just for cell walls” undersells what the field actually loses: pollination.  It fits what boron deficiency looks like. Young leaves pick up narrow white-to-transparent streaks between the veins. Internodes shorten. Growing points stall. Tassels come out small, with dead branches and shriveled anthers that have no pollen. Ears come out multiple, short, and poorly silked. Kernel set is scattered or missing at the tip. Boron moves poorly inside corn, so new tissue and the ear show it first. Boron also cross-links two chains of a pectin called rhamnogalacturonan II in the cell wall. That borate bridge is the one job we can point to at the molecular level. Calcium sits in the same complex and holds the bridge together. When the wall can’t lock, meristems and pollen tubes don’t grow. The pounds connection: lime and high calcium can tie boron up. So can very high potassium. Drought stops the mass flow that carries boric acid to the root. Sand and a hard rain leach it the other direction. On finer, higher-organic-matter soils the yield response is often quiet. The risk concentrates where the soil can’t hold it, or the weather won’t move it, right when silk is being built. Where to watch: sandy or low-organic-matter soils, pH above about 6.5, recently limed ground, and a dry stretch through tasseling and silking. How small is the need? A 230-bushel Illinois corn crop took up about 1.2 ounces of boron per acre, and only about 23% of it ended up in the grain.  CHO takeaway: boron doesn’t add carbon itself. It staples the new cell wall so growth can happen, and through the silk it decides whether that carbon ever becomes a kernel. A hot-water or DTPA soil test shows the supply and estimates availability. Tissue shows what the plant got. Silk at pollination shows whether reproduction has it. Grain shows what left the field. Next: Manganese. #NextLevelAg #Agronomy365 #boron #micronutrients #agronomy

Starting a series: nutrients — what they actually do in the plant. Observation + research, not textbook. A zinc-short bean plant has plenty of tryptophan (the raw material for auxin). What it’s short on is the auxin itself. That’s the 1989 Cakmak, Marschner & Bangerth finding. Zn-deficient plants had less IAA. Tryptophan went up. Zinc is needed to make auxin — not just to make tryptophan. That matches the look of Zn deficiency: • Broadleaves: short internodes, small leaves, rosetting / little leaf 
• Corn: broad bleached bands on each side of the midrib on young upper leaves, usually in the first 2–3 weeks Zn moves poorly in the plant, so new growth shows it first. Zinc also runs carbonic anhydrase — the enzyme that turns CO₂ into bicarbonate. In corn that bicarbonate feeds PEP carboxylase, the first carbon-fixing step. Short Zn and both enzymes lose activity. Pounds connection: heavy P can push Zn short (partly by suppressing mycorrhizae). Minnesota Extension flags it mainly when P₂O₅ rates run very high (>200 lb/ac) on soils already low in Zn. It works the other way too — Zn-short cotton took up too much P. Watch: soils above ~pH 6.5, eroded or high-lime spots, cool wet springs. How small is the need? A 230-bu Illinois corn crop took up about 7 oz Zn/acre. ~62% of that left in the grain. CHO takeaway: Zn doesn’t add carbon. It helps feed CO₂ into corn’s carbon-fixing machinery, and through auxin it helps decide where new growth goes. DTPA soil test = supply. Tissue = what the plant got. Grain = what left the field. Next: Boron. #NextLevelAg #Agronomy365 #The5Percent #zinc #micronutrients #agronomy

53,000 seeds per bushel. Grain analysis samples are rolling into the lab, and the spread is eye-opening. One field we just ran came in at 53,000 seeds/bu in one zone and 59,000 in the other. For reference, last year's largest seed we saw was about 57,900. Other samples are coming in around 90,000. Same 56 pounds of corn creates that bushel. At 53,000, each kernel carries about 70% more weight than a kernel at 90,000. So what does that tell us? It tells us how well the back half of the season was managed, did we get rain to finish. Kernel numbers get set early, but kernel weight gets built during grain fill. That comes down to keeping leaves green, holding plant health and nutrition through late summer, and keeping the plant filling until black layer. That's a lot of yield potential sitting on the backside of the season. A Grain analysis test shows you where you landed. Send in two ears and get plant nutrition and grain size back. Pair it with a soil test and you can see what to manage differently next year. #GrainAnalysis #Corn #Agronomy #GrainFill #NextLevelAg