#csbp

Tell us about your role and what you do as Field Research Manager at CSBP?

Each season CSBP conducts around 45 field trials looking at a range of nutritional topics over several crop and pasture types. Growers don’t have time to do multi-treatment replicated trials, but we have the resources to do this research on their behalf.

Our main objective is to help drive growers’ production sustainably and profitably. If we can help improve their fertiliser use efficiency, then more of the nutrients they apply will end up in the crop.

My role is to work closely with our account managers, agronomists and field research team to design and manage relevant trials. These will hopefully lead to positive changes in the way farmers approach soil and plant nutrition.

What’s currently happening with our trials program?

CSBP is investing in a number of different topics in 2022, under the categories of placement, timing, rates and products. Nitrogen and potassium continue to be hot topics among growers who are keen to improve crop yields by tweaking how these nutrients are applied. We have a large nitrogen hub at Three Springs and a potassium hub at York.

What are you doing to improve nitrogen use efficiency for growers?

Nitrogen continues to be a major driver of crop production and in the current environment of global volatility, nitrogen use efficiency has never been more important. We continue to see the benefits and efficiencies of banding Flexi-N compared to top dressing urea.

Further to this, our trials are showing the higher rates of banded Flexi-N at seeding are our best-performing treatments. The exception to this has been leaching environments along the South Coast of WA. We will continue to explore rates, timing and placement strategies to increase our knowledge in this space as new technologies become available.

Tell us why CSBP developed CSBP Urea Sustain.

Our new product, Urea Sustain, has been developed to help farmers improve their nitrogen use efficiency when applying urea. With a higher nitrogen use efficiency, less urea delivers the same result and there is a lower risk of nitrogen loss to the environment.

How will CSBP Urea Sustain improve nitrogen use efficiency for growers?

Urea Sustain contains a unique formulation that targets multiple nitrogen loss pathways — volatilisation, denitrification and leaching — with one application. When urea is applied to soil it starts to convert into different forms of nitrogen and depending on the environment, there is a risk nitrogen can be lost to the atmosphere.

Urea Sustain inhibits the activity of the soil enzyme urease, reducing nitrogen loss into the atmosphere. It also contains an ingredient that inhibits the activity of nitrifying bacteria in the soil. This slows the conversion of ammonium to nitrate which ultimately reduces leaching.

What results are you seeing at the Three Springs trial hub?

We have a nitrogen trial hub in Three Springs where we are investigating three related topics in the one paddock:

Managing stubble and nitrogen inputs.

Urease and nitrification inhibitors.

Timing and placement.

We are already seeing very positive results from side-by-side visual comparisons of Urea Sustain versus untreated urea applied at the same rate.

What do you enjoy most about your job at CSBP?

I really enjoy speaking to growers about the research we’re conducting and the genuine interest they have in our trials. Growers face new challenges each season, particularly involving farm inputs and how they are managing to remain profitable and sustainable.

These challenges are only going to increase and CSBP plays a vital role in helping growers to navigate these topics. As partners, we have a vested interest in our customers remaining profitable for many years to come!

Justin Mercy

- Field Research Manager

Since graduating from UWA in 1995 Justin has had several roles in the Agriculture industry mainly focusing on agronomy, research and product development.

Justin has been with CSBP for 10 years as our Product Manager and in more recent years as our Field Research Manager.

Justin has a wide range of experience in Agriculture and is passionate about developing new products and services to help growers increase their efficiencies.

···

Justin Mercy

“Kayne Rant” by Bo Burnham

Okay listen. I stopped writing for this blog because I thought that all of the stuff that I was writing wasn’t good or funny and that the few people that actually read this would lose all interest in it. Here’s the thing though, I don’t actually care if anyone reads this or not. It’s for me. I will attempt to be funny, but it might not work out. If you don’t like it, then don’t read it, but I will try my best to entertain you. 

So let’s begin again.

The worst part of anxiety is the first moment of an episode where have this shortness of breath, the kind of moment where you know something bad is about to happen but it hasn’t yet hit you. You breathe in like you’re about to take a punch to the gut and you just wait for the punch to come, but it never connects. I experience this feeling when I talk to people about my future, school, social interactions, money, cutting my hair, or red-orange crayons. Okay. Let’s be real for a second here, the red orange crayon thing was not the most dramatic thing on that list and I probably shouldn’t have ended my list of things that stress me out with that, but it’s still a big issue for me. Be red or be orange. Or just get a new name. You’re trying to tell me that we have color names for literally every shade of blue, but when it comes to red and/or orange we just combine the two and slap a hyphen in there? Fuck you crayola. 

That was not the point of all of this.

There’s just so many instances in my life where I feel like I can’t breathe. Like when people ask me about college and my plans for this coming year or when I’m underwater. People tell me that that last one is pretty natural and that everyone stresses about moving away from home, but it really shakes me. I have a feeling of pain and hurt in my heart that hits me deeply. 

I started taking medication for this pain. Prozac. Not a lot, but still some to take just to see if it will help me. There are two things about this pill that I thought was sort of noteworthy. 1). the drug tastes a little bit like coffee which I thought was a nice way to start off my day and 2). after taking an antidepressant I became more blissfully, joyously, suicidal than I have ever been in my life. That is not really the goal of an antidepressant. Okay, now how do I make this funny. I can’t. It sucks. Everything is hopeless and there is no reason for any of us to try to change things about our lives because it will end in failure. Sorry, that might be the antidepressant talking.

Here’s how I make it funny: (I have no idea if that was the proper use for a colon)

“Rock Bottom” by Modern Baseball

I can’t talk. I just do not communicate well with other human beings. I have a very slight lisp, which people just fucking love pointing out to me as often as they can, and so sometimes the physical act of forming words is very difficult for me which makes conversation hard. 

A couple weeks ago I was in my stress management class (I have a lot of panic attacks during this class ironically) and we were having a classroom day, which is when we spend time reading a book about how to not be stressed and basically it’s only tactic is “try to breathe”. Like, fuck you book, I’ve literally been breathing my whole life.

We were reading this shitty book of useless tactics and I needed to pee. Reader, you and I are going to get personal about my body for a second here. When I need to pee, I need to pee. I feel like I’m always talking about butts or gross body functions. So basically, I go from being fine to needing a bathroom stat. So we are sitting in the classroom reading this book, and I get up to ask my teacher to go to the bathroom.

I walk up to her and say “may I go to the bathroom” in a whisper because the room is dead silent and I don’t think anyone in my class needs to know about my frequent body functions. In addition to whispering, I sort of slurred the phrase together because there are no sharp or hard consonants in in and it’s hard for me to pronounce. My teacher looks at me and asks what I said, so in order to be more clear I said “Can I go to the bathroom?” in a louder whisper. And let me tell you, that was a mistake. My stress management teacher is the kind of person who thinks the public humiliation of students is something that’s pretty fucking funny. I disagree.

“I don’t know, can you?” she says at the volume that you’d speak if you’re talking to someone who continuously asks questions about what they’re supposed to be doing. Let me clarify; she’s being real fucking loud. The entire class looks up from their books and looks at me waiting for my response. 

My response was not stellar. I replied “I’ve been known to be able to” which is not something that literally anyone should ever hear about me. My teacher then permitted me to leave the room which, at this point, I desperately wanted to do.

“An Elegy For Baby Blues” by the Wonder Years

This past summer I was a camp counselor at a summer camp in Indiana for five weeks and let me tell you, kids are all sorts of fucked up. I went into the summer with such a good attitude, but turns out kids are shitty. Now, some of these stories (in fact most of them) are not instances of kids doing mean, bad things but that’s because a large majority of the terrible things that the kids I lived with did aren’t funny. Most of them are just terrible and that makes me think that you wouldn’t want to read them because I’m guessing that you didn’t come here to read stories about kids who throw rocks at each other and get into fist fights. Stories like that aren’t funny, they just make me want to never reproduce. So anyways, here’s a bunch of stuff that happened to me while working at camp.

- - -

So, I’m not sure if I touched on it but some kids that I dealt with were not great. I think that it’s kind of odd that I walked away from this summer with a handful of children all under the age of eleven that I actively dislike. My first week of working was filled with some terrible kids. I lived with ten ten-year-olds and they constantly liked to remind me how old they were. Most of the kids were just rowdy, and loud, which by itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but when instigated by another, more rowdy, kid, things quickly go south. One kid was particularly horrendous. I’m not going to use a pseudonym for him because I think that his name is terrifyingly fitting. His name is Gage and I feel like his parents knew that he was going to be a rotten kid, otherwise why the fuck would they name their child mother fucking “Gage”? He’s the kind of kid who just really needs to cool it. The kind of kid who does shitty things for the sole purpose of being shitty. He would sit at meals and just scream at the top of his lungs for no other reason than to make sure that everyone knew that his voice had not yet given out. So to recap: he’s pretty rotten. On the first full day of camp for these kids, we went to this rad building called the nature center, which is full of snakes and turtles and frogs and raccoon fur and other fun things for kids to play with/touch/look at. While we were inside the nature center, Gage was being mean to the other kids and if there’s one thing that I fucking hate it’s bullies. So I pulled him aside, and told him to behave and to apologize to the other kids. He did so by mumbling a quick “sorry” without looking the others in the eyes. This didn’t bother me because that’s about all I expected from him because he did the exact same thing to one of the other counselors that we lived with earlier that day. After we were done at the nature center, we were walking back to our cabin and Gage pulled me aside and said that he was really sorry. He told me that he wanted this week to be amazing for not only him, but the other kids in the cabin and for myself and my fellow counselors and that he wanted to change so that he could make things awesome for everyone. I was super impressed that such a young kid could come up with such a mature apology. He then said that he was going to catch up with the other kids, who were about fifty feet away from us. So he said his goodbye and went into a full sprint towards the slowest kid in the pack in front of us. As he runs, he extends his arm so that it’s parallel to the ground. HE FUCKING CLOTHES LINED THE KID. To my horror, I watched Gage catch his peer by the neck and take him to the ground. He literally just got done telling me that he wanted to make the week amazing for the other kids and so I guess beating the snot out of them was his idea of amazing.

Lesson of the story: fuck you Gage. What is wrong with you, you’re a monster. ...I just said “fuck you” to a ten year old. I think I’m a monster.

- - - 

I was a day camp counselor, which means that I hang out with resident campers in the mornings and in the evenings, but during the day I hang out with a set of kids from the surrounding towns who come in from nine a.m. until three p.m.. The kids are either dropped off by their parents or some counselors take a bus and pick them up from certain stops in their town. One day during my third week of working it was my turn to do morning bus duty and it went pretty well. The bus was starting to get full and I was able to breathe easily because it seemed like nothing bad was going to happen in the final fifteen minutes of the bus ride. Well we were driving and all of a sudden, the bus was filled with a scent so fowl that it made my eyes water. You know how when you smell poop in a situation that you really shouldn’t be smelling poop in, you kind of try to ignore it in hopes that your nose is deceiving you so you won’t have to deal with it? No? Just me? So if you couldn’t tell by now, it smelled like a kid had pooped himself. Now, we were taught how to deal with a kid when they wet the bed during staff training: you just walk over and spill water all over yourself, the kid, and the bed to make it look like you were the reason for all of the wetness to the other kids so the kid who wet the bed didn’t feel so embarrassed. Well, we were not trained on how to deal with kids who can’t control their anuses. This is my second post in a row about anuses. So for a quick second there, my brain was like “just shit yourself so he’s not so embarrassed in front of all of his friends”. I then proceeded to wonder what the fuck was wrong with me for thinking that a plan like that would work. All that would happen is the kids would ridicule me and the other kid for not having control over our sphincters. I’m very glad that I didn’t do what my brain told me to do for the obvious reason of enjoying clean underwear, but also because I realized that we were driving past a farm full of cows. The smell was cow poop. It wasn’t a kid. It was a cow. I hope that one day, that cow that pooped so much that we would smell it inside a school bus, is turned into a hamburger that I will eat.

Here’s what I learned: if your brain tells you to shit yourself, ask your brain why and then even if it’s a pretty good reason DON’T DO IT. THERE COULD JUST BE A COW HANGING AROUND TRYING TO WRECK YOUR LIFE.

- - -

In my fourth week of working, there was a flu that was going around camp. It was a twelve hour bug that made you throw up and get super tired, but once those twelve hours were up you were fine. I never got this illness, which is surprising because both of the counselors that I was living with got it and so did some of my kids. We found out that one of our kids got it in a very odd way. My cabin and I were walking to a cookout which was about a half mile away from the nurse station, when one of the kids told us that he wasn’t feeling well. So me and the other counselors talked and decided that I would walk to the nurse station with him, so that the nurses could check him out. So we walked the half mile back to the station and they checked him out. They told me that he was fine and that he was most likely just dehydrated and tired and to make sure that he was drinking water and that he got a good night of sleep the following night. So, we walked almost all the way to the site of the cookout (it’s been roughly a mile and a half of walking with this kid) when the kid let out the loudest fart that I have ever heard in my life. He then threw up a ridiculous amount. Then, silence. He looked at me and said, “I feel a lot better now”. Thanks, homie. We walked all the way back to the nurse station (we have reached mile two) and they took him in. I kind of feel like they should’ve been able to tell that he was going explode from both ends at our last visit.

“Floorboards” by Real Friends

So here’s my checklist for being a depressed human being with no actual reason to be depressed:

- Cereal at midnight

- This fucking beard that I need to shave but have absolutely no motivation to shave

- Broken razors (can’t shave now, sorry)

- A Spotify premium account with multiple playlists of sad songs for torturing myself

- Unfinished homework “oh, I’ll just do it in the morning” which, here’s a secret, is complete bullshit

- Post it’s everywhere in my room reminding me to do simple basic human things: “change your clothes”, “eat breakfast”, “eat lunch”, “eat”

- Weight gain followed by excessive weight loss

- Blankets all over

- Ibuprofen (for the fucking headaches)

and finally

- milk. A shit ton of milk.

“You’re Not Salinger, Get Over It” by the Wonder Years

When I was in the seventh grade I went on a trip with the Jr. High band to Gatlinburg, TN because we had a performance there or something. To be completely honest I have absolutely no idea what we did there, I just know that we went and to this day I still wonder what the fuck we actually did there. So clearly, the band part of the trip was rather boring, but what I do remember is that we went to Dollywood, which is an amusement park not to be confused with Hollywood in CA or Bollywood in mother fucking India. Now, releasing a bunch of twelve year old’s to be on their own in some random part of Tennessee isn’t a great idea, mostly because kids are shitty at that age but whatever. The day was fun and no one was murdered or kidnapped so you could say that for the staff and chaperones, this was a definite win. We were on our way back to our home in the suburbs of Chicago, which was going to be a seven hour ride on a nice coach bus when we were looking over all of the loot that we had picked up at the park.

I’m going to interrupt myself here to inform you that in this blog I will be using pseudonyms because I don’t want people following me who I know, then hear me be brutally honest, then seeing me in person and giving me a classic “fuck you” between their index and ring finger. The pseudonyms will stay consistent throughout this blog so you’ll be able to follow who I’m talking about. Anyways.

So we’re en route home and we are looking at all our shit from Dollywood. I was sitting next to my best friend at the time named Paul and behind us was this guy named Jerry. Now, some backround about Jerry. Jerry is a fucking maniac. He’s one of those kids who should probably never have sugar but has an absolute shit ton. He’s that kid who would mix all of his cafeteria food together and then eat it all. Just overall not a super great dude. Anyway, Jerry had won this large stuffed bowling pin while at Dollywood. I’m not sure why a toy like that even exists, I can’t even imagine who the target demographic is for that plush but hey if it’s your “thing” then message me and I’ll make sure to never bring it up again. 

So Jerry was sitting next to his bowling pin and Paul turned behind us and grabbed it. Paul then took the large plush and began to hit me its flat bottom. This went on for several moments until Paul hit me so hard that my face went flying straight into the bus window that I was sitting next to. Needless to say, this hurt a lot and I was pissed. I had a giant red mark on my forehead and a headache, so Paul immediately apologized and told me that I could get one shot on him with the pin. I held the pin up near his face and as I did this I realized that I was not going to do much damage to him because at the time I was irresponsibly skinny and had absolutely no muscle. So instead of hitting him with the pin, I punched him in the fucking face.