What he sells is Quick-Sol, a soil amendment that promises healthier plants and soil and more production. It's the same thing any number of products have promised farmers over the years, and the success rate has been such that farmers are instinctively skeptical of such claims.
Myers sells and distributes Quick-Sol in Texas. The product has been used in South America for several years, and most of the formal research that's been done on the product has been done at South American universities. Myers has learned that if there is one thing that American farmers don't care about, it's research trials in South America.
"We give up the product for free to anybody who wants to test it if they will test it in a control plot and put it out the way we tell them," Myers said "I've been a distributor in Texas for the last three years, and it's been an interesting three years as far as the weather goes. Nothing did very well last year.
"We have a control site and a Quick-Sol site. We do two applications, one just before or right after emergence, and another one when the plant blooms. The plant uptakes silicon, which acts like glass when pests try to eat it. Aside from that, it's great for the plants. The leaves are larger, the root system is better."
Quick-Sol was developed to remediate oil wells, but an unintended result was a greening of grass and mesquite around the wells where it was used. Texas was the first place Quick-Sol was used as a soil amendment in this country, and it's now available in five states. Myers, a retired diamond wholesaler who lives in Comfort where the product was developed, used the product on his garden and flowers before it was available commercially and let it be known that he would like to distribute it in Texas. A couple of years later, he got his chance.
"The biggest challenge at first is getting people to try it," he said. "They've heard all this before. I don't blame them for being skeptical. All we ask is that they try it."
Quick-Sol received considerable attention in North Carolina when retired agronomist Glen Howard sprayed the product on dying tobacco transplants that were about to be thrown away. The plants not only survived, but thrived, and the results were widely reported by regional agriculture publications.
Myers said the farmer trials in Texas showed the best results the first year, especially around the Corpus Christi area. Results were mixed the second year after several cotton farmers in the Panhandle put the product out about the same time high winds and heavy rains destroyed the plants. Myers said results were good last year for farmers who received at least enough moisture to get the plants out of the ground, but not all of them did.
One who did was Freddy Plagems, who reported to Myers that when his cotton was about a foot tall, the untreated cotton didn't look as fresh as the treated cotton, and that continued all the way through the season. After the cotton was defoliated, a day before the mechanical harvest was to begin, Plagems hand-harvested the treated and non-treated cotton plants by hand. Yield from the cotton with Quick Sol was more than 20 percent higher than the untreated cotton, he reported, and the average loan value was 1.5 cents per pound higher.
Danny Bell with Danny Bell Farms in the Panhandle also likes what he has seen of the product so far, writing: "We have used Quick-Sol for two years now. We have used the product on cotton and watermelons and have been pleased with the results. The watermelons seem to really respond to the product between cuttings. The vines recover faster and mature the next cutting. We are learning more about this product every year. I think it is money well spent."
Quick-Sol is classified as a water-soluble silicon product engineered to provide agriculture with a product that promotes the health of soil, plants and trees. In addition to silicon it contains calcium, iron, humic acid, fulvic acid, sodium, copper, zinc, magnesium, manganese, hydrogen and oxygen. It's organic, biodegradable and is designed to produce an ionic charge that stimulates microbial activity.
"We've tested this in 22 countries on everything from soybeans to cotton to corn and wheat to grasses and flowers," Myers said. "We've had good results everywhere we've gone, which is why the company has started distributing it in this country."
Though Quick-Sol has been distributed primarily to agriculture in this country, Myers said the company plans to introduce it to golf courses, landscapers and turf specialists in the coming years, though he expects farmers will continue to be the primary users of the product.
In the meantime, he's looking forward to the day when he can introduce the product to someone new without hearing the term "snake oil" used or implied. That, he believes, will come with time, and a little rain during the growing season wouldn't hurt anything, either.
