Near-record expenses and near-record commodity prices have created an environment where new companies are popping up everywhere selling various biological products, bombarding farmers with advertisements that make all sorts of claims. How do you know what to believe? Now more than ever in this unpredictable market, we have to find solutions that work in our operations.
For biological products – or as we call them, Naturals – to perform well from a return-on-investment standpoint, consistency is critical. Equally as important, we want to ensure all products mixed with Naturals are compatible because many of these products are living microbes whose viability can be reduced by certain chemistries or even in the presence of contaminants that are naturally found within water sources.
That’s why in the fall of 2020, Hefty Seed Company introduced Alpha Complete.
Alpha Complete combines five Naturals products: Micro-Cycle, Nutex EDA, Boost 10, Water-Rite, and Bio-Prep. By grouping these products together, the performance of each individual product is consistently maximized, so this package helps cut through the noise and simplifies the use of Naturals on your farm. Each box of Alpha Complete contains enough product to treat 40 acres and is intended to be applied in-furrow on a wide array of crops, including corn, soybeans, and sugarbeets.
Here is a breakdown of how each product within Alpha Complete works:
Micro-Cycle contains six different nutrient-solubilizing bacteria that break minerals down into plant-available nutrients. Specifically, the microbes within Micro-Cycle target and release potassium, sulfur, and phosphorusby establishing themselves within the root zone releasing these specific nutrients during critical stages of crop growth. Since these microbes unlock minerals from the soil in a form ideal for uptake and in a location easier for plants to find them, the crop spends less energy to get more of what it needs.
Nutex EDA is a proprietary transport mechanism that moves nutrients from the root zone to individual plant cells. Nutex EDA has the unique ability to target nutrients within the plant and help them move through the vascular systems to reach the specific areas where they are needed most. With the efficiency of nutrient transport improved, the plant simply spends less energy on moving nutrients, leaving more energy for photosynthesis production.
Boost 10 is a package of amino acids that helps plants be more efficient with photosynthesis all throughout the season. Since amino acids are the backbone of all plant proteins, adding Boost 10 gives plants early access to these essential components as they develop, aiding in photosynthetic processes. Plants also spend a tremendous amount of energy storing sugars and carbohydrates to use at a later date. The amino acids within Boost 10 allow plants to expend less energy to recall these food sources once reproductive stages begin, giving a boost to end-of-season yields. Thus, Boost 10 helps crops reach their maximum potential all throughout the season.
Finally, we come to Water-Rite and Bio-Prep, two of the most important products in Alpha Complete. Water isn’t just water, and the variability of water sources across the Midwest can be detrimental to the success of biological products. Take rural water, for instance. Rural water is treated with chlorine to make it safe for human consumption. Chlorine’s job is to kill any and all microorganisms within the water. If you add a living microbe into a mix using rural water as the water source, what is the end result? DEAD MICROBES! Bio-Prep neutralizes chlorine and transforms it into the plant nutrient, chloride, feeding your crops while protecting the Naturals you hope to benefit from. However, chlorine isn’t the only problematic thing you can find in your water. Calcium, magnesium, and iron also pose a significant threat to the success of any Naturals product, and the higher the pH of your water source, the more likely these elements will cause you problems. Water-Rite neutralizes the effects these elements have on both biological products and traditional crop protection.
Realistically, if a biological product sees a yield increase 60%-70% of the time, then companies will take that product to market and try to sell it to you. But as farmers, we expect biological products to perform better than that! That’s the big issue with the biological market today – inconsistent performance leads us to assume these products don’t work! With Alpha Complete, Hefty Seed Company combines products that have exhibited a solid track record of making great returns over many years. In 2021, we added to that record, seeing an average increase of 7.39 bushels in corn and 2.55 bushels in soybeans across all third-party replicated trials. Alpha Complete is a complete package that includes nutrient-solubilizing microbes, a nutrient-transporting system, an efficiency-improving amino acid package, and water-correcting products to make sure everything works as intended. All this gives you the absolute best chance at seeing a positive yield response – consistently. If you’re interested in trying Alpha Complete on your farm, reach out to an agronomist at your local Hefty Seed Company store.