Crops are planted. Fields are sidedressed. Hay is cut. You’d think Granvil Travis would kick his boots off and take a break — but you’d think wrong.

Granvil is busy scouting fields, hauling grain, bushhogging, finishing postemergence fertilizer and fungicide applications, starting preharvest maintenance, shopping for a soybean head for his new combine, and taking his family to the county fair. All while keeping his eyes on the weather forecast.

“If it stays wet, we won’t have to worry about irrigating, but if it turns off and goes dry, we may have to irrigate. If we get a big rain, we might have to run a flood pump. You just never know, and this is the time of year when we have to be ready for anything.”

Granvil says his crop looks good and he’s prepared to help keep it that way not only with irrigation or pumping water off a field, but also with additional micronutrients as long as the ROI makes sense.

During a normal June, Granvil Travis would be attending his girls’ tee-ball games, cutting hay, weaning calves and thinking about irrigation. But this June, more moisture is the last thing on his mind.

“It feels like we spent the whole month of May rained out. Some of my seed was still in the bag at the beginning of June. It almost feels like we’ll have two crops this year — the early crop and the later crop that felt like it took forever to get in the ground.”

The seed that was planted early, and didn’t get flooded out, looks good. That included Granvil’s BioPath® trial field.

“It’s one of the best-looking fields we’ve got. It has a few quarter-acre-sized holes in it, but nothing major. I’m happy with it so far.”

With planting wrapped and emergence happening, Granvil quickly started gathering tissue samples. The early tissue samples on the BioPath field showed promising nutrient levels. He’s looking forward to seeing the outcome of similar samples following his sidedress application.

Granvil Travis is trying his BioPath® application earlier this season to see if his yield results will increase. Will this application approach work? Join Granvil as he takes you to his trial field and discusses his strategy for applying BioPath to his corn and soybean fields.

If there’s a theme for Granvil Travis this month, it’s all about equipment. From the proactive prep work like moving monitors into a new tractor and checking connections, to making some emergency repairs to his spreader buggy, this season already has him on his toes.

“The weather was cooperating, and I was making good progress spreading my fertilizer. Midway through, the tongue broke off the spreader buggy so we had to stop, order parts, and we spent several days welding and patching it up so we could get back to spreading. What was supposed to be an easy Saturday turned into a headache.”

But if there’s one thing farmers know how to do, it’s how to adapt when circumstances throw them a curveball. Granvil was able to wrap up his spreading, where he variable-rate-applied DAP and potash. For his fields that had some magnesium deficiencies, he also spread K-Mag®, which is a granular blend of magnesium, potassium and sulfur from Mosaic.

With the warmer weather in Southern Illinois, Granvil is already planting soybeans, which includes a trial of a Mosaic experimental biological product that incorporates BioPath®. Corn planting won’t be too far behind, and he will be conducting two BioPath trials for that crop.

Working on a diversified farm with beef cattle and row crops means that there are no downtimes for Granvil. There are always cows to feed or corn to haul. But as the weather starts warming up, he only gets busier.

Right now, you can usually find him in the Quonset getting the equipment ready to go before planting starts. This year, that includes prepping a fertilizer buggy they purchased last year.

“In early March, when other guys are out spraying their wheat, we like to go out and VRT our potash and DAP. We’ll add in some Boron or Zinc if we need to as well.”

Granvil is going to be planting his 2024 BioPath trial in a field that used to be soybeans. He’s mapping that out now, and with the warmer weather, it will likely start in early April.

Granvil’s goal is similar to many other farmers: keep the family farm profitable for the next generation. To see if biologicals can play a role in his goal, he conducted some trials for the first time last season — sidedressing BioPath in two 20-acre blocks.

Join him for the 2024 growing season as he shifts to 40-foot strips across the whole field.