Today is the addition of back roads of Illinois. We were bringing elastic for farming sources and information sponsored by AgriGold. We were talking about the importance of inputs cost.
Farmers are facing a tighter profit margins to the growing season in 2025. They are challenging to the inputs for this growing season. Nick Frederick and agronomist with Agri-Gold. Nick is telling us what's going on with the inputs cost.
Then we were talking about the weather in Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere with meteorologist John Barrick for this afternoon. This is your Rural News sponsored by AgriGold. The American Farm Bureau Convention is underway right now in San Antonio, Texas.
Their top priority is the farm bill in the labor, taxes the final day to day. Corn prices are rally after the call off about the tariffs for Colombia after the migration. The greens markets are bound back after the tariffs threats in South America. Finally,
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Farmers are facing a tighter profit margins to the growing season in 2025. They are challenging to the inputs for this growing season. Nick Frederick and agronomist with Agri Gold. Nick is telling us what's going on with the inputs cost
Will farmers have the most successful if the soil test have like low input cost is high? Yes, Caesar. So farmers this year in 2025 are looking at trimming input costs across the board. Commodity prices have dipped and input costs have gone up in some areas.
So as growers are looking to trim those costs, it's important to pay attention to our soil tests going into 2025. Our soils make up the foundation of our crop production. So it's really important that we understand what's happening below ground and making sure that our nutrient loads are balanced prior to going into 2025. That's where we're going to find a lot of success.
You know, having growers utilize their soil tests is just a component of all those tools that they have available to them. What cost per fertilizer and herbicides for this year? I'm sorry Cesar, can you repeat that?
What cost for fertilizer and herbicides for this year? Well, the cost for fertilizer is going to vary based on which fertilizer growers are looking at. You know, the fertilizers that farmers are using would be your nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. And geographically, those prices probably change.
In terms of herbicides, at Aggregold, we don't sell herbicides. But their farmers do have a lot of options in the market today. In terms of brand, trade name products, or generics, where they can get a little bit cheaper prices there. So these are certainly some places that farmers will look to trim costs in 2025 if they're conscious of the economics.
foresight and if they places like fertilizer or herbicide, even fungicides, they'll probably have a trick effect on the back end. So they need to think forward if they get a trick of cost on the fertilizer herbicide or fungicide. What does that mean for the rest of the season? Is there a negative impact to that? Of course, Nick.
CEC, do you think about it? Absolutely. So CEC is another great metric to evaluate on the soil test. This is probably the second place that I go when I'm looking at a soil test to help me understand how heavy the soil is, how much holding capacity I have,
Not only is CEC important for nutrient holding capacity, but it also gives you some insight to the water holding capacity and how heavy or light a soil might be. So absolutely, CEC is probably the second place I look after I evaluate the pH.
What advice for farmers about waiting in the input for 2025 growing season? I think the best advice for farmers that are evaluating their input costs and fertilizers and things for the 2025 growing season is that if you want to trim your inputs, again, have that forethought of what that means down the road,
I would suggest to growers that are looking to pull back on their fertilizer and reduce the amount of fertilizer they're applying to the crop. You might also want to think about pulling back the population in your field with the plants because I always use this analogy. You wouldn't want to give less groceries
to a group of people that just leads to a bunch of hungry people. And we've got to think about plants the same way out in the field. We don't want to give less fertilizer to the same number of plants out in the field. So let's maximize the plants if we're looking to pull back on fertilizer in 2025 by backing off that plant population. Now you've balanced that ratio again, max plants out in the field.
Will you have a financial planning from Agri Gold? No, I don't think we have any financial planning specifically with Agri Gold. But if anybody's listening and wants to talk through the cost of inputs and what that means on a farms operation, I know that there are plenty of local Agri Gold agronomists and salesmen that would be happy to sit down and have those conversations with the grower.
Thanks, Nick. I enjoyed our conversation for today. This is Nick Frederick and agronomist with Agri-Gold on back roads of Illinois. Yep, this has been a lot of fun, Caesar. I appreciate it.
We were talking about the weather in Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere with meteorologist John Barrick. A John Howard things with the weather department for farmers in the Midwest.
Yeah, so Cesar, good to be with you again. Overall, I think farmers are pretty, I think they're getting ready to get going here. You turn the calendar into January. We're kind of in the back half of winter and farmers start looking at, all right, when can I start moving? And unfortunately, we're going to wait a little bit because it's still only the end of January. But if I were to gauge kind of
The pulse of what I'm seeing at least weather-wise here, especially across Illinois, but more specifically across the Midwest in general. Overall, the farther south you are, the better you're feeling at this point in the winter. We've had plenty of systems roll through. We had some heavy snow events go from Kansas City all the way through the Ohio Valley here. That was pretty heavy. I remember a couple of those events in early January there that had
six to 12 inches of snowfall with them. But we've had kind of a lack of snow in the upper Midwest. So Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, we haven't seen a whole lot of snowfall up our way. That's where I'm at in Minnesota. So I'm looking outside my window right now and we're gonna hit 50 probably tomorrow and we just don't have any snow on the ground. So there's a little bit of a tenuous factor with some of us on the northern side of the Midwest about how much soil moisture we might have.
once we get to spring, but we still got a long ways to go. So that's good news. And like I said, the farther south you are, the better your soil moisture is and the better I think you're feeling about your situation here for this winter. But we do still have a ways to go. And, you know, the month of February and especially March are going to be key as to, you know, what our planting conditions are going to look like here.
Um, as, as we get into springtime. So, uh, we've got a little bit of ways to go yet about two months and, uh, then we can really kind of focus on the day to day details, but, you know, looking at kind of what it looks like for the, the season here. Um, you know, when we're talking about the weather for, for the rest of, of, of the winter into the early spring.
We're finally sucked into this La Nina pattern here, Caesar. It's taken a very long time to kind of set up, but it finally has gotten into shape. We're really seeing the transition here this week. We'll be into it firmly for a good portion of February, probably all the way through March as well.
And what this generally means is we get this cold pocket of air that kind of builds up over the Canadian prairies, Western Canada, the Pacific Northwest, and it gets really warm in the southeast. And we kind of in the Midwest in general, but Illinois specifically are in the middle of that. And we kind of tends to lead to a very active storm track.
especially from Texas up into the northeast so that covers most of the state of Illinois, most of the Midwest, some areas up across the north and when you get into the Canadian prayer or into the northern plains like the Dakotas, they end up missing out more than some folks farther south and east. So we tend to see a little bit more of an active period here. We should see
storm systems with a little bit more regularity to them than what we saw in January. A lot of those kind of fell off to the south for the most part, but I think we'll be more in line with some more.
significant weather systems moving through. Whether or not we see a bunch of snow with that. I mean, we're kind of going to be on the edge of that. If we're on the warm side of things with the warmth coming up from the southeast, then we tend to get rain, maybe even thunderstorms. And if we get a little bit more of a push of cold air, and I'm sure we will several times here over the next two months, we might get some pretty decent snow out of it too. But in general, we're calling for kind of
wishy washy temperatures as we kind of navigate between the cold and the warm, but overall above normal precipitation. So I think that, you know, if some folks there, especially across the northern portions of Illinois, into Wisconsin, maybe Iowa, if you're listening from there, I think you've got better chances here for getting some precipitation, getting some better soil moisture prior to spring planting.
And then we might have to worry about a little bit too much. If it is active and it stays active all the way through March, God forbid it goes into April, we could be talking about some soils that are a little too wet and we might have some concerns over that. So I think of anything, I don't think you need to, if you're worried about having too little soil moisture right now, I don't think you need to worry about that for the next couple of months. And if anything,
You know, we might have a little bit too much coming up. Are you watching the soil temperature for right now? John. No, not forgetting ready for this planting prep.
Yeah, sorry, sorry to cut you off there, Caesar. No, we're not really worried about that right now. It's the end of January. So we've got a long time to go before that comes to fruition. And the only thing that might be is if this La Nina pattern lingers too long, that does lead to some potential for cold shots later in the spring, kind of in the mid to late April, possibly into May.
That would be the, you know, the concern possibly, but I think it's a low probability event right now. John, why this winter is very mild in central Illinois, I am from. Could you explain to our audience?
Yeah, well, Caesar, I don't know if it really has been then. Maybe you've been inside the last few weeks or this week has just been kind of a nice break from it. But January has been a very cold month here really through most of the country, East of the Rockies. I was looking up some of the data here.
and what we've been seeing if you go from the beginning of January or really right after Christmas until just a couple of days ago. I mean, it's one of the top third coldest winters on record and some portions of the southeast, especially where they saw
some snow earlier this month. It's been a top 10 coldest January so far. So it's been kind of a rough month here. It's been coming in spurts and some of those were pretty significant. I was luckily down in Florida when we had our last big burst of cold last week. We saw a lot of temperatures below zero up here in Minnesota.
and we didn't get to above zero and, you know, Louisiana saw some significant snow. They've had more snow in New Orleans than we've had here in Minneapolis, which is kind of crazy. But yeah, it's been a very cold month overall. Now, December was a very warm month. We kind of flipped dramatically. We had a very warm December and then had a pretty darn cold January here. Luckily, this week, we've
We're kind of in a transition period, like I said, and we've got some warm temperatures moving in. That'll last here into February a little bit.
especially in Illinois. But like I said, about that La Nina pattern showing up, that's going to be a little bit interesting here for the next couple of weeks. We're going to be kind of on the edge of things and whether or not that means we're a little on the warm side or a little on the cold side. It's just going to be dependent on how these systems kind of pull down some of that cold air from the Canadian prairies. So yeah, I mean,
Overall, I think we've kind of been more of a Jekyll and Hyde type of winter. Started off very warm in December, got very cold in January, and now we're going to waffle a little bit here in February.
Yeah, so La Nina was really the kicker here. We didn't have it for a very long time. When we were talking to folks a year ago, we were expecting it, or La Nina to be in place in summer of last year, and it waited all the way till January. So because that was not a feature for November, December, and really into the middle of January, we had other things that kind of drove our weather.
Some things like, I don't want to get too technical with you at all, but there's a band of thunderstorms that moves along the equator. We call that the MJO, the Madden-Julian Oscillation. That's very important to providing energy into the jet stream and how that kind of shapes up that had a big play.
during the course of the last couple of months. We've had very warm temperatures in the North Pacific. That's kind of shifted things around a little bit while we were kind of warm in December. And then as that got too warm, that allowed some colder air that was bubbling up in northwestern Canada to kind of flow down in January. And so we had
kind of other things going on that were not La Nina related. But now that we've kind of established that over the last couple of weeks, that's really influencing the pattern and it will be here for at least the month of February, most likely the month of March and possibly into
April as well. We'll have to see about how that goes though. We don't have a whole lot of confidence because it's not a very strong one. It's weak and it's not going to last very long. It should be peeking out here over the next couple of weeks. So with a slow regression back to normal, or at least the cold side of normal through the spring, it'll have waning influence on our weather as we get into the springtime.
Do you have any final thoughts on the weather forecast for next few weeks?
Yeah, so I mean, I think Cesar, we're going to see a bunch of variability and it's going to be kind of tough to really forecast more than probably a week out. Models are probably going to have some tough time with just how cold that area is in Canada, just how warm it is in the southeast and how those are going to do battle across the Midwest here. So expect some storms to move through.
But it's going to be tough to say whether or not we're going to be on the warm side in Illinois, most likely probably will, or if we'll be on the cold side of it and get some snow. So expect some pretty decent storm systems to be rolling through. I'd expect our soil moisture issues to kind of go away. I know there's still a little bit of snow on the satellite picture here across South Central Illinois. It seems to be going away.
And I think the days are getting longer, any snow we do get will probably start melting off pretty decently. Thanks, John, for coming. You have a great day. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, Cesar. Always good to talk to you. This is John Barrick, meteorologist for DT and on back roads of Illinois.
Thanks to Nick Frederick and John Barrick, meteorologist for DT and the spin-back roads of Illinois. I am Caesar Delgado, you have a great day.