Weeds AR Wild, Episode 25 
Title: Cotton Defoliation
T. Barber and B. Robertson, September 20, 2021

Hello and welcome to the Weeds AR Wild podcast series as a part of Arkansas Row Crops Radio. This is Tom Barber, extension weed scientist with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. Today I have Dr. Bill Robertson with me on the podcast. Bill, as most of you know is our extension cotton specialist. Welcome back to the Weeds AR Wild podcast Bill.

Bill: Thanks Tom. 

Tom: I know last time we were talking about, the as time I had you as a guest we were talking about how late the cotton crop was and we were wanting some heat units in September to kind of finish it out. At least for the first two weeks we got those heat units maybe.

Bill: Yeah, we sure did and did we start off ugly or what? 

Tom: It was nasty. 

Bill: Yeah it was nasty. Like a basketball team. A lot of times teams can kind of start off a little rough and they get a little better and get a little better and when they get to the conference tournament they get better and they peak when they get into the tournament and that’s kind of maybe what some of our cotton crops did this year. Some of our later cotton looked pretty ugly. We were getting late in the calendar and it was getting hard to find big bolls out there, but his cotton crop has really turned around and it’s looking better and we’re starting to knock some leaves off. 

Tom: Yeah, that’s why we’re here. We want to discuss cotton defoliation or harvest aids and programs a little bit and when to get started and because it’s such an odd year I think people may be a little confused on when they do need to get rolling and if you can think back, Bill, I can remember picking cotton in the middle of September in the past in some instances and to my knowledge we don’t have any cotton pickers rolling yet but I have talked to few people that have started the defoliation process and I know you’re getting calls as well, so let’s talk about it. Jump in here and let’s talk about timing. So with this cotton crop being a little later, tell us what you think about timing and how we need to judge and if that field’s ready or not.

Bill: You know this 9-11 thing just passed and everybody kind of remembers what they were doing. I was putting out big defoliation tests on 9-11. And I think back, it just seems to me like Tom that we’re putting our harvest aids out a little later and a little later and a little later every year. I don’t know if maybe we’re pushing the crop a little more and a lot of times on dry years we can get by with pushing a little more nitrogen, but it just seems like maybe some of the varieties too that some of our varieties used to when they cut out they were done. These varieties a lot of them tend to hang on. Like you were saying a while ago, kind of our target has always been that we need to have a picker in the field somewhere by the middle of September. Well today is September the 16th and I don’t know anybody that has a picker in the field and we’re just really getting going good. In fact I‘ve talked to some people and they’re thinking maybe a third of their acres they’re going to have their first shot on by the first part of next week, so we’re just running a little bit later it seems like kind of by the nature. And you know you look at our harvest machines Tom, the new pickers that are coming out have about a million dollar price tag. These pickers we have now are expensive enough but I know some people that have 22, 24, some of them have 2500 acres on one picker. And that is really stretching that pickers capacity really hard. So we’ve got to get the pickers rolling. And then you lay that on top of our temperatures. If you look at the first half of August, we accumulated a lot of heat units. And compare that to what we accumulated the first half of September, but the first half of August we were pretty close to that 20 heat unit a day mark, but by the time we look at that first half of September we’re right at 14 heat units a day has kind of been our average when I was looking. I was looking at Poinsett temperatures, so our temperature heat units although we’ve gotten some good temperatures,  we hadn’t had any really low temperatures to slow the cotton down that much, our heat units are dropping the way we always see that. And by the time we get to the end of the month we’re down to the neighborhood hardly busting 10 heat units a day and that last week in September and then we accumulate heat units the first half of October and basically we’re done. But you know when you’re, I’ve been in Arkansas since 1995 Tom, and it seems like year in and year out, and our harvest aid programs used to be really, really expensive, but still they’re expensive enough, but I used to always think for my boll openers, for the amount of money I pay for them and to put them out for us to have to the heat units for them to work, for us to get our money’s worth out of them, I always felt like our boll openers had to go out that last week in September because we got to take advantage of the heat units so we got the last week of September for them work. And when you look at your first shot and typically 5 to 7 days later we put our second shot out, we’re knocking on the door of our second shot going out that last week of September and we’re on the front end of the defoliation season, not the back end. And so we’ve got to get going. We just have to get going. A lot of our fields have a good number of heat units on there and percent of open bolls coming up, so we’ve got to pull our ears back and just get started. 

Tom: Well, no I agree and you know when I look at the cotton in my plots where we have some ? farm work or whatever, a lot of that’s just now just 30 and 40 percent open and so I think we have to be realistic too, like you’re saying. I mean we want the heat units to get those harvest aids to work so we definitely need to be thinking about that, but also if we go too early, we’re not going to get the fruit we think we’re going to get on the top I guess because it’s just not going to be mature. And so we’ve got to be mindful and realistic as to what the goals are for the cotton crop and if it’s lagging behind, like you say, we’ve got this front moving through, we’re going to get cooler temperatures starting next week, we’re not going to have heat unit to mature it out the top the way we might have wanted to, the last few bolls or whatever, so a lot of that’s just not going to make it in the basket I think at the end of the day. 

Bill: Yeah, you know Tom I’ve done some harvest day-timings and when I harvest, when I put the first shot out at 758 units past cut-out, I’ve taken a little bit of a yield penalty on that. It seemed like when I defoliate at 750, the bolls will open with our products that we put on bolls, they can open a boll whether it’s mature or not. It doesn’t have to be mature for it to open. It just needs to be, we need to have plant activity. But we can open the bolls at 750, but it just doesn’t seem like they fluff out well. And I don’t know if it’s because they don’t fluff out well that we don’t harvest as much cotton or what. But when I harvest it at 850, I’ve done the test where I harvest at 750, 850, 950 and 1050 and from 850 on the bolls open up and fluff out well. But you now when I look at the pounds of cotton that we pick and when I put those different heat unit timings out, I try to harvest each one of those when it’s harvest ready, I don’t wait until the very end to harvest them all at one time. So it’s kind of a pain for the farmer that I’m doing this on to harvest these for me, but a lot of times I would nearly always get a rain between my 850 harvest and my 950. And between my 950 and 1050, I’d get another rain. So by the time I’d lose cotton to the ground from the rain, I’d lose cotton quality dollar wise per acre. It just wasn’t any advantage waiting past 850, but there was, like you say, there was a little bit of a yield penalty for defoliating too early. But you know, the year that we’ve had this year, we’ve had, it’s been pretty dry, we’ve had some good heat units and so sometimes if you look at percent open bolls, it’ll fool you. If we’ve got a lot of fertility out there and Mother Nature’s been giving us some rain, ? a lot of horsepower, those bolls even though they’re mature are just not opening up. That’s just, opening is just associated with ? of the plant. And when they’ve got their second wind, well they’re not thinking about going ? or like grandbabies being tired for a nap. So sometimes open bolls will fool you, but I think our open bolls are going to kind of be in line with kind of our traditional thoughts on for us somewhere between 50 and 55 percent open is when we’ve got to get things going. And you know you talk about some of your plots being about 30 to 40 percent with the heat units we’re getting as dry as it is, we’ll get there pretty quick. But it’s just right around the corner.

Tom: Nah & I agree and I think our plan is to observe and start putting some treatments out next week. And I agree with you 100% on everything that you just said right there and I think it’s important to know you made a very good point and just don’t rely on percentage of open only because I’ve seen many times, just like you said, it can fool you. You can always go out there and find that upper most harvestable boll and take that pipe cutter or whatever and slice it open and make sure there’s no jelly in that seed and Bill it’s been my experience as long as we don’t have jelly in the middle, a mean a lot of times that boll’s going to open, you know, if the jelly’s not in the middle of that seed. 

Bill: Exactly and you know a lot of times I have to train my eye sometimes. And I have to do that every year. But I’ll find a plant. Our fruit retention’s been really good, although I’ll find a plant that has a boll that’s just kind of grinning at ya and then I’ll look and make sure it’s got first position bolls up the plant from there and then I’ll slice those bolls, and when you slice that boll that’s just grinning at ya, whose seed coats are really, really dark. And then as you go up, one, two, three, four nodes above that, you can kind of see how the seeds are very mature, the ? leaves are well formed and unfurrow, the seed coats get a little lighter and a little lighter as you go up, but then when you get to about that six and seven nodes above that cracked boll, then you start running into that jelly where the ? aren’t formed, so a lot times somewhere around that, the four is kind of the number I like to use, but when you get into nodes above a crack a boll, about four or five, that’s about where we get into that transition with what you’re talking about where you’re starting to see that jelly in there. I talked to an agent today, they were in a field that had 850 heat units on there, they felt like they were running about 55% open boll and node above cracked boll was four and I said man you got 3 signals there telling you it’s time to defoliate. And so they were fixing to pull the trigger on it. 

Tom: Absolutely. And so when we get to that point and we know it’s time to go, you know there’s several factors that I remember in doing defoliation work over the years that can play a role in how well the defoliation program works and there is a lot of different ways we can defoliate a cotton crop. I mean I’ve always said and heard, and I grew up here and it’s more of an art than science. You just dump some things, cross your fingers and hope it works good ya know, but definitely I think when we look at temperatures, you know temperatures are a key in how well some products work vs others. In the heat of the battle, if we were putting out some defoliate earlier this week with the hot temperatures, I’m usually more of just a drop, which I don’t think we can even buy a drop anymore, it’s called free fall and maybe some others, Bidazaron, whatever formulation it’s in, but Bidazaron or TBZ plus Prep or plus Finish, something with ? in it, seems to be what a lot of consultants are going with right now with the temperatures the way they are. But as we move . . . yeah, go ahead.

Bill: I was going to say, my old standby is like a 3-way def, drop and prep. You know, the prep, the ? , a little bit of folex now and then the pdc and then depending on how much regrowth inhibition we want is how much of the Bidazaron we want for just maybe knock off one of the green leaves, a lot of times a gallon to sixty will get you but if you’re wanting to get a little bit of regrowth inhibition you need to drop down to a gallon to fifty and if you’re really, really serious and need a lot of regrowth inhibition, you know a gallon, a gallon to forty-five, somewhere in there. But anyway that’ll get you on that but some of the consultants I’ve been visiting with and I know in the past when I looked at Finish, Finish was a little bit of an expensive product but it’s a really good product. 

Tom: It’s really good, it really is.

Bill: And something that I always like about that Tom, it is so fast. Now if the plant has a ton of horsepower and it’s really, really green and all that, a lot of times I’ll be a little disappointed in leaf drop on it. But the boll opening has never disappointed me on boll opening. But I think where cotton is now with the temperatures that we have, a lot of people are cutting back on their nitrogen, the plants have a good boll load, having a good boll load, boll load’s a stress, but having that good stress on the plant always seems to make the harvest aid products work. If you’ve got big ? gaps and the plants just don’t have that stress, a lot of times the products don’t work that good, but most of the fields I’ve seen now, when you go into something like Finish, I’ve talked to consultants and a lot of them are using like a gallon to twelve of Finish and a gallon to fifty a drop and that I think is a really good program and they say it’s a few cents cheaper than that old standby that I was just talking about. But the thing that I really like about that, when you use Finish out there, if you don’t see it in four or five days, it’s not going to happen. So where a lot of times I’d have to wait five to seven days and sometimes if you’ve had ? gaps I’d have to wait a whole week to put my boll opening out there. You got to get the boll opening products out there where they can get good contact on the boll. But with this, and the people I’m talking to this year, out of the norm, is four to five days and so buying those extra days I think is a big deal. 

Tom: Oh it makes a big difference if we can get that second application on there faster. Going with all the heat units that we’re looking at loosing over the next couple of weeks, the faster we can get that second application on there and get these bolls up and opened up, the better off we’re going to be and you know I agree with you 100%. That Finish product to me just looks, it’s always been more expensive, so in the past a lot of people haven’t used it because of that, but to me it’s a better, it has that synergist in there and it just works faster and it provides better boll opening potential, horsepower if you will than just the generic prep.

Bill: But you know regardless of what we use Tom, defoliates don’t translocate in a plant do they? They are where you put them and so we’ve got to do a good job putting those in there and you now as we get towards the end of the season, and I see these spray rigs running across the field, we’re way past plant bug sprays now, but when we’re kind of on the tail end of our plant bug sprays, you see those John Deere sprayers, second gear wide open. What is that, about 17, 18 miles an hour? And some of them are not even, they’re doing 7, 8 gallon work. How much of that stuff is really getting into canopy? You know if we do our harvest aids like that, we’re going to be pretty sad but you know a lot of people slow down, a lot of folks try to shoot for around the twelve gallon mark, some go up to fifteen, but slowing down, putting out more water and Tom, this world we’re in now, we all, everything we do, I know it, things that I do, things that you do, things that farmers do, we all know what we’re suppose to be doing but sometimes we just have to do the best we can don’t we? And so sometimes if we have to go a little faster than what we want, I’ve seen it, we use a coarser droplet size that we do a better job of getting that product down in the canopy and something else that goes along with this and I know it’s sometimes easier said than done, but when you got that 90 ft, 120 ft boom, the boss man’s on your rear end all the time about not running that thing in the ground, hitting things and all that, so it’s easy for you to run that thing about 10 ft above the canopy isn’t it Tom? 

Tom: I see a lot of them run that way.

Bill: So that you’re not running into things and so when the boss man’s there a lot of times the boom height is about right but when the boss man leaves that boom height gets a little tall. When that boom gets a little tall it’ll tell on you because that velocity of that droplet coming out of that spray tip is really something that you need to get that down in there and there’s recommended heights for those tips and a lot of them are around a couple of foot and so when we start getting over that we lose the force of that droplet to help us get it in the canopy. So slowing down, putting out more water, and using the right droplet size, and keeping that boom height where we want it is going to go a long, long ways on making these products work right and us being happy with what’s going on and making the leaves fall off and not sticking leaves. 

Tom: Well that’s right and you know nobody wants stuck leaves and again those are usually the questions that I get, what should I put out now, I don’t want sticky leaves, the temperatures are doing this or whatever, but I go back to what you said, the 3-way has always been fail safe for me and that’s why I recommend it because any given mixture on one field may work but it’s a broad recommendation time in and time out that 3-way on the front end, at least in the first shot, or the first application, has always been best and the safest as far as not sticking those leaves. And then really on that second application, once you knock the top out of it on the second application, it doesn’t matter to me as much about the mixture then because a lot of those leaves are just begging to fall off anyway. 

Bill: Yeah, your sensitive leaves that you’re worried about sticking are gone. They’re gone. You can be harsh. 

Tom: You can be as harsh as you want on that second shot.

Bill: And so that’s the beauty of here in Arkansas we go at two shot approach. Now I know in other states, like you go across the river in Mississippi, and they make a one shot work really good for them, but the difference is if we waited until our cotton was 75-80% open, we could make a one shot work. Ok, when would start putting defoliates out in Arkansas when we got to be 70 to 80% open? It would be, well, I don’t know if we would get there. 

Tom: I don’t think we would get there this year. 

Bill: We’d have no heat units for it to work.

Tom: We’d go eat Thanksgiving dinner and then put it out this year. 

Bill: Yeah, and so that’s kind of the trade-off. Here, we got to find that sweet spot between getting the leaves off and getting it out of the field because the longer it sets in the field and we start getting the rainfall when fronts come through, we get the rainfall events, we get a lot of weathering on our cotton, we get weathering on our lint, we lose weight, even if it doesn’t fall to the ground, but then we lose cotton falling to the ground and then we lose fiber quality too. But see the burs deteriorate too and there’s been a lot times that I’ve seen cotton where it was still in the field in December and as soon as that picker header hits that plant those locks shatter to the ground. And so we’ve lost way more cotton at the end of the year for it being still in the field than that yield variety ??? , so anyway we have to find that sweet spot because some of it we probably need to start a little too early because some of it at the end we’re going to be too late. 

Tom: Well it’s like you said, we got to get those pickers rolling, so it’s time. We got to pick some fields and just get started if we haven’t already. And you know you mentioned the rainfall and I know we’ve got a front, we’re sitting here visiting on Thursday, the 16th, but you look at the long term forecast and we’ve got some pretty high chances of rain early part of next week and you know Bill when we talk about these applications and environment, it’s been my experience over the years that you know if you put anything out two to three days before that front or two to three days after, I mean a lot of times it’s just a waste of money. It seems to me we have to let that cotton recover. I don’t know if it’s the cotton that needs to recover or just the environment itself, but the products just don’t seem to work before and right after these cool fronts that move through this time of year.

Bill: That’s exactly true Tom. And I tell people it’s like the snowball effect. Ok, when we put harvest aids out, basically we’re slowly injuring the plant, because if we injure the plant too fast, we kill the leaf and it desiccates and sticks on the plant, right? So we want to slowly injure the leaf and then in response that injury then the plant gives off ethaline which the plant has a big burst of ethaline and then that triggers the formation of the enzymes that dissolve the layer cells of that precision zone, so the same precision zones that make the leaves fall off and the sutures on the boll if the boll’s open. Ok, so if we put, so it’s like a two-step process. We got to do our part by putting it out there and then the plant has to do its part. So if we put, say if we’re one or two days in front of a big cold front, and we do our part, but then this cold front comes through, we get a big rain, it’s cloudy, the next thing you know we’re wearing coats, well the plant can’t do its part. And most times we’re very disappointed in the lack of performance on that harvest aid to work because we did our part but the plant couldn’t do its part. And so then a few days after that the plant, you know, cotton doesn’t really grow when the temperatures get below 60, but it’s not like flipping a light switch on and off. The plant, it’s kind of, at the end of the year, it’s kind of getting old like me, so when I get to going again, it takes me a little while to get to going. And so there’s a couple of days in there we have to let the plant kind of recover so that whenever we do our part the plant has got its feet under it enough that it can do its part for the products to work. And a lot people really feel like, you know, we need about that three to four day window in front of or behind a big significant change for the plant to do its part. 

Tom: Right, right. Well, I know that when you look at the, and we go back to product and product selection, we tend to as far as our recommendations, stay away from the herbicide type defoliants on that first application just because of the younger leaves and the potential for those burning up before they fall off, like you mentioned earlier, so we tend to save those products for the second application because we can be more harsh and burning the leaves to get them off of there. But as these temperatures change and if we see the temperatures dip down, for highs below 60 degrees, I mean we’re pretty much stuck with the herbicide type defoliant to get the leaves off of there, because products like drop or free fall, the ones that contain ? , once the temperatures drop below 65 degrees, they just don’t work very good at all.

Bill: You know the plant activity is kind of like going down the steps. Our plant activity’s high so we’re at the top, on the second floor and then things work good, we’ve got our herbicide defoliant products like Folex figured out and then we get a cold front through and that activity drops down to the next step, sometimes it drops two steps and so we have to kick our rate up a little bit. And that’s why some of those products are kind of a little bit tricky to use because every time we get a cold front or something come in, we have to up our rate a little bit. And so our plant activity goes, keeps stepping down but it never, even when we get some really nice temperatures and all that, it never really goes up a step. It’s kind of a one-way direction coming down. And so I always feel like when we get temperatures in the very low 50’s and upper 40’s, then we’re almost at the very bottom of the staircase. We get to the point where we may do a little bit of maturing of the lint and develop another seed, but basically the first time we get temperatures down, you know, 50 to 48, 47, then it’s done, it’s over. And people, you know, cotton’s a tropical plant, but you look at some of our grasses that we’ve put up for hay, you know when we get temperatures cold like that growing hay’s over with isn’t it Tom? So ? along the same line. And so like next Wednesday the temperature’s going to get down to 54 degrees is kind of what they’re expecting on the 22nd and so that’s going to really take a big chunk out of the activity of the plant and they’re expecting a low of 52 on the last day of September on the forecast and you know when you look at the forecast on-line, who knows how accurate they’re going to be. But the bottom line is, we’re going to be running out of heat units really real quick. You go outside right now and you just sweat your rear end off. Before long we’re going to be wearing jackets and our heat units are going to be gone. We’re going to have some cool nights and the plant activity is going to be gone. And then we got a lot of ground to cover. 

Tom: Right, yeah. I agree. It’s time to get started and do something even if it’s wrong, right? 

Bill: Yeah

Tom: So just real quick and we’ll wrap up. When we talk about fiber quality and we get questions a lot on how can I maintain preserve fiber quality and a lot of times we’re not talking about getting premiums, we’re really talking about avoiding discounts. You know how can, what can we do from a defoliation harvest aid standpoint to avoid most of those discounts? I know we can’t change whether it rains or not once it opens but other than color what can we control there? 

Bill: You know, let’s step back to last year and look. Last year almost half of our acres were 1646 and 1646 has a wonderful fiber package. It has a good mic, the length strength, all of that’s really good and I think we’ve got some varieties this year that may have a little higher mic but bottom line is we had just about as good a cotton quality from, when you look at percent of our crop that was tenderable, we had a higher percent of anybody else in the country growing cotton last year. Now this year, think back in the old days Tom when we had like 1218 and 0912 that were just a higher mic than a heartbeat, so we had to play the game to defoliate early to avoid that. I don’t think we have any varieties that we have to worry about like that here. But the thing is and I know you’ve probably done this too Tom, but I’ve helped growers and I’ve had studies in fields that didn’t have a single leaf left on that plant. We harvest it and I get the grades back from the gin and I’m in the leaf discounts. And then you get to looking at that and look at the bracks, there’s some of the things that we do when we fry the bracks on the plant and they don’t fall off. And so I think some of our leaf trash comes from that. Now if we do a poor job on defoliation and we leave some of those leaf skirts on there, certainly some of the extra leaf we’re going to have is going to come from leaves that are still on there. There’s thing that we can do, I’m looking at some products this year to see, ok can we knock the leaves off and not fry the bracks. And so that will help us there. Ok, so that will help us on the leaf some. Ok now think about when we pick cotton and I know I’ve done this before, things sometimes never go the way you want and by the time I put a picker in the field Tom, I think some of that cotton had more leaves on it when I picked it than regrowth leaves to start with before I put any harvest aid out. And a lot of times you know, I haven’t, I don’t think I’ve ever had cotton come back with green stain, but when you put that cotton up, in the situation if you can get it ginned off pretty quick you can still have a lot of green leaf in there because that green leaf adds more moisture. Just think what moisture does in the grain bin. That’s where it’s going to start heating up. That’s where you’re going to start having problems. That moisture from that leaf in a cotton trailer, in a module, or in a round module, and it stays for a long time, it’s going to add moisture, so we’ve got molding and things like that are going on, so we could go from, we’re going to have I think, the way the weather’s going right now, we’re going to have a lot of 11’s and 21’s to start with, but then as we start getting more and more rain, we go, we start seeing more 31’s and then we get down to 41’s and then as that weathers, then we start moving over to the 32’s and the 42’s and then working our way down south so putting cotton up dry, in a module, don’t start too early, don’t go too late and then do a good job of dropping the leaves off but not having a lot of green leaf in there and that will go a long ways in helping us maintain the color that we have because just like you said a while ago, the quality of our cotton is as good as it’s ever going to be when it’s there in the field. And we’ve got to do the things we need to do to preserve that good quality, so not having a lot of green, wet material in there to bring our color down. Those are the big things that I think we can do and I know sometimes where we have so many acres on a machine and we don’t feel like we can hire somebody to come help us and we’ve got to do those ourselves and so we start a little early in the morning and we go way too late in the day. Sometimes those discounts that we get because we put that cotton up wet can really nip us in the wallet really, really hard. And sometimes we kind of forget about that at the end when we look at things. 

Tom: Those are all real good points Bill. I appreciate you joining us today and discussing some of these. I know there’s, the cotton specialists put out a publication every year, The Mid-South Defoliation Guide, is that right?

Bill: Yeah we have an MP # for it, I think it’s MP 503 Tom. But it’s on our website, you go to the farm and ranch, and go to the cotton page on our website and it’ll list one of those publications, but the 2021 Mid-South Cotton Defoliation Guide. 

Tom: And that’s a collaborative project between yourself and several of the mid-south cotton specialists, is that right? 

Bill: Exactly

Tom: It may go further than mid-south, I can’t remember.

Bill: Yeah well I think it’s most of the states in that like, in the northern part of Alabama is, their cotton, the way they grow cotton and the way cotton responds is just like mid-south. So anyway it’s a collaboration and I think when this started you were a cotton specialist here and so you had a big part in helping get this thing going so we’re just trying to, we’re updating that and keeping it alive, trying to keep it pertinent as much as we can. I like that publications. I think you’ll did a great job when you got this going and with myself and some of the other specialists we’re doing a good job of keeping it going. But I think a lot of people find that it’s a very useful guide.

Tom: Yeah, so everybody should check that out. If you want some more information on this topic we’re talking about today. It’s got rates, it’s got situations. You know situational topics, recipes and knowing what situation you’re in so I’d advise everybody to go check that out online when you get a chance. So again we want to thank everybody for listening. Again thanks to Dr. Bill Robertson for joining us today and talking about cotton defoliation. And we’re hoping everybody has a safe and abundant harvest this year. And hopefully Bill we can get through this one safely and quickly. Maybe October will turn out dry and we can pick every day. That’d be great wouldn’t it.

Bill: Yeah, we got our fingers crossed that we’ll end up this, but this is kind of my favorite time of the year because it’s almost over. It’s almost over man.

Tom: That’s right. I just always enjoy harvest.

Bill: I appreciate you inviting me to do this with you Tom.

Tom: Absolutely, I appreciate you being here and I want to thank everybody for joining us on this episode of the Weeds AR Wild podcast series on Arkansas Row Crops Radio.