By Brian Hefty: Don’t you love advertising? They always make everything sound so fantastic. For example:
• Get a 2 to 10 bushel gain from inoculant!
• You can apply your inoculant 45 days in advance!
• The additional growth component in our inoculant dramatically increases your yield!

Then, after you use the inoculant, you’re disappointed because your results don’t match the claims of the advertising. Let’s sort through the fl uff and get to the facts.

FACT: Inoculant is LIVE rhizobia bacteria that can colonize on soybean roots. There are different strains of inoculant for different legume crops, like peas, for example.

FACT: Thanks to modern science, researchers can now sort out the “good” bacteria from all the others, unlike what they could do 20 years ago. The newer strains of
inoculant ARE better.

FACT: Even with the “extended life” inoculants (where the manufacturers basically provide a food source for the bacteria so they can live on seed longer before planting), it is quite common for 50% of the bacteria to die in the fi rst 24 hours, according to the studies we’ve seen. Sure, the extended life inoculants may allow a certain percentage of the bacteria to live 30, 45, or possibly even more days than that, but you will always get the MOST living bacteria in the soil if you treat your seed and plant almost immediately. Now, this is not to say that extended life inoculants serve no purpose or you should never use them, but we would rather see you apply the inoculant yourself the day you’ll plant rather than apply any inoculant weeks or months ahead of time.

FACT: All that really matters in the end is return on investment. We don’t care how much stuff a manufacturer claims to put in their product, what strain they claim to
use, or how fantastic their yield data looks, all you should ever focus on is cost vs. reward. In other words, don’t be disappointed because your hopes got really built up
and you only got a 0.5 bushel gain, focus on return on investment. Even at 0.5 bushels, you still gained $4 to $5 an acre for an investment of $1.50 to $2.50. Here’s the quick math on that:
$5 gained minus $2.50 spent equals $2.50.
$2.50 net gain divided by $2.50 spent times 100 equals 100% ROI.
Since you bought the inoculant in May and harvested the crop in October, you only invested your money for 5 months. Therefore, 100% times 12 months in a year divided by 5 months equals 240% NET APR ROI!

FACT: If your net gain is only $2.50 per acre on 1000 acres of soybeans, that’s $2500 more net income for your farm for as little as 2 or 3 hours of work. Let’s say it took you 2.5 hours. Divide $2500 by 2.5 hours. YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT A $1000 AN HOUR JOB!

In summary, I believe there’s a lot of misleading advertising out there, which is unfortunate. Do your best to apply inoculant as close to planting time as possible. If you’re storing inoculant on your farm, keep it cool and out of the sunlight. Finally, always focus on return on investment rather than just yield, because even minute gains in yield could mean you doubled or tripled your money. The best soybean inoculant we’ve found to date is ROOTastic, but there are other good products out there, too.