Excavator

Breaking down crop residue. A new biological designed to break down tough crop residue and clear the way for today's high speed planters is a unique collection of bacteria and amino acids. It's called Excavator, and it stimulates natural biological activity that speeds residue decay and releases nutrients faster. I asked spokesperson Larry Fien when to apply it. Right after harvest is a good time to make the application. There is potentially a few caveats, but in terms of corn on corn acres by far, that's the best time to make the application. Why I'm saying some caveats is that these things are fairly fast. They're much faster than we thought they initially would be at breaking down the cell walls and releasing nutrients into the soil profile because they're effective as they are. Auburn University has done pretty extensive work on it. They're showing 50 percent reduction in the pure weight of stocks in a cornfield from the time of harvest until planting time. When you're using one of these products just to give you a benchmark 28 percent nitrogen that's sprayed corn stalks is about 18 percent. So it's a pretty big leap from where we were with spraying liquid nitrogen on corn stalks to now these microbes, liquid nitrogen, 18 percent reduction by way, these microbes, 50 percent reduction by weight. So it's a pretty big move and pretty good progress. Excavator by Meristem Crop Performance.