Discover MagrowTec's Finance Program. Spray Now. Pay Later - LEARN MORE
Discover MagrowTec's Finance Program. Spray Now. Pay Later - LEARN MORE
Episode 042
May 1, 2025 • 45 Minutes
Gary Wickham travels to Rocky Ford, Georgia to sit down with Justin Smith, who farms 6,500 acres of cotton, corn and peanuts with his brother — and has run the same MagrowTec system across two different sprayers for five years. Half the carrier volume. A third less glyphosate. And not one maintenance dollar spent.
Today we’re in Rocky Ford, Georgia, sitting down with Justin Smith — a farmer who started right out of high school alongside his dad and his brother, and who’s now, at 40, twenty-five years into it. He and his brother farm 6,500 acres of cotton, corn and peanuts, with a little wheat in the winter.
Justin is the kind of grower who does his homework before he buys anything. He first heard about MagrowTec at another farm five years ago, went home, researched it, and put one unit on his Case sprayer just to see. He liked it enough after a single season that he put a second one on his John Deere.
Here’s what five years on MagrowTec looks like. He was running 10 to 20 gallons an acre to get the coverage he needed — now he’s never above 10, and often down to five or six. He cut glyphosate from 32 ounces to 20 and thinks he can go lower. He dropped his drift agents everywhere the label doesn’t require them. He’s spraying 200 more acres a day per sprayer — a thousand more acres a week out of the same machine, the same operator, the same fuel bill. On a farm whose most distant field sits 27 miles away, that means fewer water trucks, fewer road miles, fewer machine hours, and better trade-in value when the sprayer finally turns over. And when he changed sprayers, he moved the MagrowTec system himself in about an hour and a half. No dealer. No wires. In five years, he hasn’t spent a dollar on maintenance.
“You take a guy running a sprayer, and if he can spray 200 more acres a day, one tank a day, five days a week, that’s 1,000 acres more he can spray with one sprayer just by running MagrowTec.”
Justin Smith
Grower, Screven County, GA
We get into the things you can only see with your own eyes, too. Turning a peanut leaf over and finding white fungicide residue on the underside. Watching spray lay down into the canopy instead of drifting past the cab when he stops to turn around. Defoliating cotton at six gallons an acre and still opening bolls. Spraying paraquat with a neighbor’s watermelons across the fence row and onions down the road — and not holding his breath about it. Justin makes a point that’s worth sitting with: weeds got resistant because we were never getting the coverage in the first place. Change the coverage, and you change the whole equation.
Along the way we talk about why 60 to 90% of crop protection is wasted to drift and poor coverage, why less than 10% typically reaches the target before MagrowTec, and why a technology built on the same physics as MRI machines and wind turbines spent years being called snake oil before growers like Justin proved it out on their own ground. We cover the engineering, too — why the stainless steel shielding means the system won’t interfere with pulse-width modulation or anything else on your boom, and why MagrowTec was built to be moved from sprayer to sprayer and to outlast every machine it’s ever mounted on.
And we finish where this business always finishes: the state of agriculture. Equipment up another 4% last year. Fuel near $5 a gallon. Commodity prices that look a lot like they did in the 1980s. Rising bankruptcies and a farm suicide rate at record highs. Justin’s answer is the one his father and grandfather would have given him — keep pushing forward, do the best you can, and make good decisions.
His advice to growers still on the fence about MagrowTec is two words long. Let’s get into it.
Grower, Screven County, GA
Justin Smith is a third-generation farmer with a focus on innovation and efficiency.
Grower, Screven County, GA
Justin Smith is a third-generation farmer with a focus on innovation and efficiency.
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