Dr. Aaron Palmateer Talks Product Costs and Why Labels Matter

From episode: EP40 - Growing A Better World with Harrell's Fertilizer

So there's a couple of things I just want to highlight or point on and that is that the cost. There's a lot of things that go into why some of these products are expensive, but also the application method and just the importance of, that if you're putting on a product, you're spending anywhere from $50 and up per a hundred gallons. You want to make sure you're doing it right. And that's where it's important to make sure you're following the manufacturer's directions on the label.

The labels are very important guys. I know a lot of people that don't even look at it, but it's the law too.

It's the legal and it's just so important. And one of the things that I tell, I want everybody to understand this, especially if you're a customer of Harrell's and you have any question, any doubt how to put that product out, pick up the phone, text, email.

Call your local rep, whoever you purchase it from, and they'll get you all the answers.

Absolutely. Because it's just important. You don't want to be wasting your money. Cause some of what goes into the development of those labels is so important because there's even environmental conditions where they say, if these particular conditions are present, you need to spray it this way and this application interval versus, cause what they're looking at is they're targeting favorable conditions for whether it's the past or the pathogen causes the disease. And so it's just, there's so much good information, but all the information that goes into generating that label costs money to build that, that foundation, everything from when these companies were paying me as a researcher at the University of Florida, but also from inception. So like, a new product, I'll give you an example. There's an insecticide called Altis that was discovered by Bayer, which Bayer is now called Enview in our world. They found actually a derivative from a plant. So it's got natural origin of fluperidiferone comes from, I think it's somewhere in Southeast Asia, they found this, this plant, they extracted, they discovered that it had insecticidal property. And so, so basically at the discovery level, you got all these scientists and the case with Bayer, they're over there in Germany in a lab and they're testing every aspect. And then, you know, you've have all that cost that goes into just the early discovery stages, and then you go from, you go from discovery to looking at, you know, how does this fit into our world? What does it do? And then once you've figured out what it does and how to use it, then you go to the whole commercialization side of it. So there's a ton that goes into that, that whole process. And the other thing to think about is in our world, if you're growing an acre of ornamentals and you look at the cost, the value of that acre, some cases it can be well over a million dollars. Yeah, depending on where it is. Right. And then you go and you look at an acre of some corn or soybean. I mean, they shoot, they need a million acres to have like, I mean, it's a night and day difference. And so the value is, it's the liability. If a good company, a manufacturer stands behind their product, a branded product, and you have a bad experience with it, they're going to come to the table and they're going to make it right.