As cotton growers look for ways to be more cost effective in their 2026 crop, Agroliquid is working with growers in the Southeast on a reallocation strategy. We sat down with Gabe Saxon, Regional Agronomist with Agroliquid to learn more.
Saxon said, “As we start to look at that, we go ahead and sit down and we make our fertility plan for the season. And we say that we’re going to make sure that we want X amount of bushels or X amount of pounds, depending on whatever it is. And we sit down and we make those decisions and then understanding the curves on when a plant actually starts to take up nutrients.”
“We take that and we say, okay, we’ve got the same amount of dollars. Let’s just not put them out up front. Let’s go ahead and give some of it up front to where it needs it, and then slowly feed the rest of it throughout the seasons. Because most of the time when we look at things, when we’re needing potassium later on in the season, we’re already making another application of some sort of pesticide. So whether it’s our second shot of herbicide, second pass of herbicide that we’re going over, or if we’re doing a fungicide application, most of the time we’re looking at the late vegetative stages, early reproductive stages of that cycle of that plant. So it allows us to go ahead and piggyback in there and actually get the nutrients into the plant when we need to have them in the plant, instead of putting everything up front and keeping our fingers crossed and hoping that mother nature just is perfect this year. And we managed to get that fed all the way through the season,” said Saxon.
“Spoon feeding, it just means that we’re reallocating dollars from one place and putting them in the other. We’re keeping with the same nutrient. We’re not changing the amount of pounds of nutrients that we’re putting into the soil or the plant. We’re just taking those funds, that bucket of money and saying, hey, instead of dumping it all out at one time, we’re going to slowly, methodically make different applications throughout the season. Go to Agroliquid.com. They can go look at the products that we have. They can actually pull down their sales reps in their part of the world, go and look at all of our research over the last 38 years,” said Saxon.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.