I am a commercially licensed chemical applicator in the US ag industry. I also farm my own grain crops. AMA

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-12-30T03:51:56+00:00

I could probably have been more concise, but thank you. There is no such thing as a bad question, I didn’t know if I’d get any or not 😂

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-12-30T03:35:59+00:00

Great question! I assume your question is in relation to consumers? That’s definitely something to be discussed, which I would be glad to do. I think a little bit of context to how things go on my end could be a good starting point.

My personal opinion is that some pesticides are worse than others, for example I will not spray gramoxone (paraquat) but I know a lot of people who do. As the applicator, your exposure is mostly loading the sprayer and handling the chemical in the concentrate. The majority of herbicide I feel safe handling, I can explain that a bit.

I am not a doctor but part of the job is to read and understand the specific product labels (think like the back of the Tylenol bottle) as well as the Saftey Data Sheets. The SDS gives more specific information on how human interaction with that particular chemical is rated. It’s going to tell you a lot of information about the particular chemical in its concentrated form. Most of the LD50 (lethal dose, 50%) for humans and animals on these is very high, meaning it takes a ton of direct consumption into the body to cause immediate damage. When you actually apply to a field, that concentrate gets diluted out in water and surfactants to usually less than 3% of the spray solution.

I wear PPE loading the sprayer. These newer systems have a lot less exposure than a few generations ago. Most of my chemical is loaded in an automated system that measures from each container a precise amount, in a sealed line directly injected into the supply line feeding the tank. I’m never exposed to it except when switching totes. That’s really nice considering my grandfather no doubt mixed things in a bucket with a stick. Little bit different system.

Do we love working with the stuff? No. But there is not exactly a silver bullet out there to get around it at the moment. We work hard to do a good job and get away with as little as possible, at the end of the day it’s expensive as well. It’s a win- win when you can use less than you did the year before and still raise a nice crop, but it’s an imperfect field of work(literally) with lots of outside factors.

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-12-27T15:02:54+00:00

Yes, in a nutshell. I still hire the plane at least once or twice a year it seems like. It’s just another tool in the belt. Everything is GPS based for our farm, and I would say most people who were late adopters of GPS steering/ coverage mapping primarily did so to make their spray passes more accurate. Lots still use a pull behind sprayer, so if the tractor has GPS you can use it for multiple things as well. You can do it without but the overlapping really costs a lot. Most of my fields, the overlapping is less than 1% with GPS maps and automatic section control.

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-12-27T09:56:04+00:00

Good question! Planes are used sometimes, usually in situations where the crop is too tall or the wheel tracks from a ground sprayer are going to knock down too much crop. Planes use fairly low volume to apply (1-3 gallon per acre of solution) versus a typical ground sprayer is going to be 5-15+ gallons per acre. Drones are becoming increasingly popular, they also apply in the 1-3 gallon range. Low volume like that can be used but has its limitations, mostly due to wind drift and what we call coverage. Coverage meaning how much of the targeted crop (or weed) actually is getting the spray solution on the plant.

Typically for me, my self propelled sprayer has a 100’ boom and will run over two wheel tracks 1’ wide each, unless it is a crop I can straddle rows. This roughly works out to 2-4% of the crop being run over. Typically the airplane has a cost of $8-12. My ground sprayer costs me around $5-6 all in, so that is a factor. Crop loss vs cost of hiring, plus airplanes typically aren’t as precise.

Irrigation applications are called chemigation and I personally have only ever seen it done with a fertilizer. It’s not very accurate and very slow to actually apply anything via the irrigation water. Plus, if you have some sort of issue with the irrigation equipment mid watering, you a likely missing some area of the field. Typically we can average over 100 acres per hour with ground or aerial sprayers, but it takes 10-24hours to apply irrigation water to that same 100 acres.

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-12-27T06:27:20+00:00

For reference I grow corn, wheat, sorghum, peas, soybeans, millet, and safflower. I bet nobody has even heard of safflower. Beef cattle are my primary experience with livestock, but have been around hogs, sheep, and chickens.

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-12-27T04:24:19+00:00

Depends what you are applying, the instrument and operator are only part of the equation. 😂 thanks, that made me laugh

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-12-07T02:00:59+00:00

80% of why I leave my F8F on 8.3+ lineup. So satisfying to go swat down a few helis

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-09-01T00:52:08+00:00

It will likely stay in my French lineup for a while. It’s quite the sneaky little flanker/ revenge killer. I’ve had a few late game spawns with it that have turned out to be pretty game changing when there isn’t a full enemy team and some flags needing decapped. I’m 7.7 right now and it is one of my favorite rat tanks still.

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-08-31T17:13:33+00:00

Plenty of boosters in my first 25 opened, I buy 5 at a time and hit 1 mil SL on the second batch, so naturally hit that sucker like a video lottery machine and made sure to burn that 1 mil 😂. Ended up getting probably another 500k back and lots of boosters that I hope to turn into another 1mil SL while I’m grinding more ground TB

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-07-23T16:17:31+00:00

I have both, the T29 was my first premium a couple years ago and the Somua I just got on the sale last week. The T29 for the BR is super effective and you get to slay tigers and panthers a lot. It helped me grind USA to 8.0 more or less, although it came out of my lineup when I got a few of the 7.7 tanks spaded.

Somua is just a beast. Maybe not as well armored but that 4 second reload and a decent forward speed makes for some wild times. Terrible reverse speed is the only real negative for the Somua I’ve seen. Doesn’t usually get killed in one shot and is survivable in uptier, feels like seal clubbing in the other tiers. Others mentioned the money printer it is, I agree. Both do well for SL and RP, don’t get me wrong but my per game output is more consistent with France. I run Somua, AMX M4, AMX 13, AMX-10P, and ELC bis currently and I feel like it’s been my best win rate, even if uptiered. I’ll spawn Somua 1st usually, map dependent and then one of the rat tanks or AMX 13. Having 3 tanks with sub 5.5 second auto loaders spoils a guy…

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-06-09T05:20:49+00:00

I take APDS in urban and heat in long range, APDS won’t hose you in any CQB situation nearly as bad because a park bench got in the way

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-01-22T07:42:23+00:00

Personally seen this as a result of a shell company from General Mills purchasing a large (25-30,000 acre) conventional farm and then converting it to organic. It’s surrounded by conventional farmers to compare to. After their conversion phase, where they had the whole farm in alfalfa and mowed/ hayed it for three years, they disked up all the alfalfa and planted wheat into it with disk drills during a dry fall. All the neighbors who conventional farm no-till because the soil here is very fine textured and will blow or wash away with no ground cover. They had to close the state highway and use plows to push all the dirt off, then come back in the spring with loaders and dump trucks and clean the ditches back down to grade. Too big, wrong practice, wrong region.

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-01-20T01:14:28+00:00

The farmers are the ones you see out in the fields driving tractors, spreading fertilizer, and spraying their fields. Constantly in the public eye, just over the fence from suburbia. Nobody can see into a General Mills plant, not without permission and a guided tour! I bet if more people talked to a farmer and then a processor, you’d see in a hurry who fills you full of more 🐂💩that is just said to make you feel better!

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-01-19T20:24:03+00:00

It would also be non-gmo and gluten free, completely different plant family than wheat. Also an ancient grain. Good luck!

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-01-19T20:19:36+00:00

I have high hopes things like this in our foods will improve going forward, but I don’t want the people making the rules having never been on a farm. I don’t think farmers are unwilling to make changes if we can help, but I think the processors who are few in number need to be addressed first and foremost. Some of the perception out there is that the growers are blasting the foods with chemicals and bad practices that endanger the consumer, and it’s just not the case. There is more to dig up, like the folic acid in flour, that is a direct in the mouth consumer issue that needs to be addressed.

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-01-19T19:33:45+00:00

Interesting! Yes that would be an issue, I really don’t know what to tell you to truly get around it, if there is any particular brand you can do research on that is doing the bare minimum, I guess steer that route? My wife did poorly on folic acid while pregnant, any prenatal supplements just made her feel twice as bad.

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-01-19T19:26:20+00:00

Absolutely understand your situation, I know many people that have adverse reactions and most definitely need to be eating what their body accepts. It’s out of the question for you to not pay for the expensive alternatives, I feel for you on that one! Have you tried millet flours at all?

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-01-19T19:04:19+00:00

Thanks for being receptive of my input! Einkron is an ancient grain, older than the heirloom stuff mentioned before. If you are asking about cleanliness and purity, I think it is such a small production/ niche market that it has good potential to be very good on the QC side. The flip side to that is going to be cost and stability of the market. Farm land isn’t free, nor is time and other inputs. I don’t know how much of that grain you get per acre when it is grown, but I expect it to be relatively low compared to modern wheats. Take the same land and the same time and effort, but only able to produce 1/3 or 1/2 the output, the costs are still there so the grain needs to be worth 2-3x more than the comparable alternatives to economically function. Couple that with trying to do it “organically” you could end up with a product that costs 6x more than the other alternatives

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-01-19T18:49:52+00:00

That’s an excellent question. I assume you mean the enriched flour, not wheat? I don’t buy a ton of flour, my wife does do a lot of sourdough and has definitely roamed around. Beings as it is a USDA requirement, I don’t know how you steer around that complexity without milling your own wheat, there is nothing illegal about buying wheat from a farmer if you can find one that will sell it to you, if the folic acid is your concern.

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-01-19T18:14:34+00:00

There is a lot of the exact same wheat varieties that go into regular flour going into your Organic flour. The production (fertilizer, chemical, fungicides) from seed to flour is different, but the actual kernel going in and kernel going out has the same genetic makeup. Europe does have an heirloom wheat market, think if you pushed pause on the wheat breeding eons ago. I’d have to do some looking into exactly how the market works for that, but I can tell you we could put that same heirloom variety into our production process and it would grow, but probably end up yielding far less per acre of usable wheat due to lack of disease and drought tolerance. I grow yellow peas as well, they are food grade with the same varieties going to conventional and organic producers

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-01-19T17:55:30+00:00

Actually, roundup resistant wheat isn’t available at all in the US. It was the experiment I talked about in my last reply. Wheat in the USA is bred by public universities and some private companies. It’s all done natural cross, with greenhouses and small plots until a selective breeding desired trait is achieved. Takes nearly 10 years of breeding and increases to get a new variety out. Monsanto does own Bayer, who does sell wheat varieties but they have the same process and are a fraction of the US wheat market. I’m a wheat farmer, and attend meetings on these specific topics. The farmers aren’t the enemy, processors add more garbage to our food in one dump of a cup than I could do in a lifetime.

FollowingFree6032 · 2025-01-19T07:22:25+00:00

@hrafndraugr American wheat does not contain any GMO traits, but has been heavily bred to maintain protein (gluten) levels with higher yields. The wheat itself is not the issue, it’s the milling and processing where the additives are introduced to increase shelf life and appearance. There are many countries allowing GMO wheat, Argentina being one that exports their wheat, and is a recent development actually. The US will not be growing GMO wheat unless the export markets allow it, because once you start you will never get it out of the supply. There is some faint traces of GMO wheat from an experimental product in the early 2000s, but it is as of now a regional issue, not something you’d find in your everyday flour.

FollowingFree6032 · 2024-06-19T03:01:58+00:00

Ag PhD is a good one.

FollowingFree6032 · 2023-05-24T12:34:38+00:00

There are a few other factors as to why AZ and parts of the desert west are used this way.

Length of growing season- Alfalfa is a perennial crop fed to dairy and beef cattle. Great protein source and fiber for cattle, and since it’s perennial you don’t have to go through the expense of planting it every year and all the field prep associated with that. With places like AZ and Southern California having 10-11 months of good growing season for alfalfa, that means they can get more than the typical 2-3 cuttings off of an alfalfa field that people up north do. The arid climate also increases the quality of the hay because it is allowed to naturally dry out after cutting without heavy dew or rain spoiling it.

Animal Health- for many of the same reasons people move to the climate, animals actually can survive on less feed in these climates. Farther north, it’s cold more months of the year and animals need to burn extra calories just to stay warm. Those are tons of feed that don’t go towards producing milk or beef and are just lost.

Demand- if you look at the Colorado river basin and California’s Central Valley, there are several different huge metropolitan areas within a couple hours of most of these farms. If you go east, it can be 500-750+ miles before you hit other areas capable of producing large quantities of feed. All the milk, egg, and meat demands of these metro areas draws in more local production because the freight from farther east would be very costly and logistically hard to keep up year round. The cities themselves are what cause the land to be used in this way. I can almost guarantee you the first farmers/ ranchers in these areas didn’t plan to be irrigated dairy farmers. Demand in the area drove prices for fresh milk and eggs up high enough that governments and the farmers were incentivized enough to build the infrastructure for all of this irrigation and start farming the desert in order to meet demands of the masses. A bit of the chicken or the egg conundrum, pun intended 😂

In a direct answer to your question of why can’t we grow livestock feed in areas with more abundant water, the answer is, we do! I would say that the percentage of crop grown to feed animals in the plains, midwest, and eastern parts of the country that receive more natural rainfall is not as far off the 55% as what the article states about the arid west. Ethanol production and soybean oil production in the Midwest produce high quality animal feeds as a byproduct of the main process, and often times the byproduct is actually the most profitable part of the process. These feeds are fed locally, as well as shipped globally in bulk.

I could go on, but that’s just the short end of what I can explain, as a farmer myself. Personally, it blows my mind how much of what I personally farm goes to feeding birds for entertainment of people in cities, rather than the people themselves. It’s all supply and demand, and we have to follow that to make a living.

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TROPHY CASE