More demands are placed on growers’ soil today than ever before. High-yield hybrids and varieties, cover crops and double crops, and related management practices all pull increasing amounts of nutrients out of the soil. Test results confirm what agronomists have predicted: Soil nutrient levels in many fields are on the decline.
Approach harvest as a time for testing
As growers head into harvest season, their focus should be not just yield, but what yield means for nutrient availability in the soil. Scott Foxhoven, who leads Mosaic®’s North American field research program for crop nutrition and biosciences, says this means growers should have a plan for soil testing.
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“The harvest season can be pretty busy and there can be a lot of different things on your mind,” Foxhoven says. “But there’s really so much importance in soil testing. You have to know where you’re at.”
With recent technological advances, there are many ways to sample soils on a farm, such as whole-field composite sampling, management zone sampling, or grid sampling. GPS technology and autonomous robotics have expanded the possibilities even further.
“In some ways, looking at how many different services are out there can give you an idea of just how important that soil sampling process is,” Foxhoven says, adding that growers can ask local retailers about services available in their area.
Go into testing with a plan
Whatever the collection method, Foxhoven emphasizes the most important thing is that growers go into their sampling program with a plan. They should ensure they’re sampling the right places, in the right season, on the right dates, and at the right depths. Use GPS coordinates and logbooks to ensure sampling is consistent.
Foxhoven emphasizes that the whole point is to track season to season, harvest to harvest.
“Beyond just getting the initial starting level of the fertility, it’s also, ‘How is that fertility level going to change over time? How are those results going to inform my work over time?'”
Use results to start a conversation
Once test results arrive back from the lab, it’s important that growers use those them to inform a conversation with their local retailer and put together a comprehensive, long-term crop nutrition plan. This is important since according to research 60 percent of yield is dependent on soil fertility. If growers don’t take care of the foundation like soil fertility, research demonstrates that it’s difficult to maximize yield, regardless of the investment on other crop inputs.
“That retailer is going to be probably your best subject matter expert in reading that soil test and understanding what the different values are going to mean,” Foxhoven says. “It’s a great opportunity to have a conversation of, ‘What’s your fertility plan going to look like for the upcoming season?’ Then, also, depending on the results of that soil test, ‘What’s that fertility plan need to look like for the next four years?'”.
The best conversations with local retailers and other advisors will look not just at the next season, but around longer-term maintenance.
“If I get that soil test back and my phosphorus is in the low to very low category, I might need to have a conversation around not just that maintenance program of nutrients,” Foxhoven says. “It’s not necessarily just fertilizing for what your yield goal is that year.”
Depending on a particular operation’s test results and on conversations with local retailers, a fall fertilizer application might be an important step to deal with nutrient removal. Trial after trial has demonstrated that MicroEssentials® is the kind of performance fertilizer to help growers resolve their crops’ fertility needs — and in ways commodity fertilizer blends can’t. MicroEssentials®, with its unique Fusion Technology, can guarantee uniform nutrient distribution, greater nutrient uptake, and season-long sulphur availability. Because MicroEssentials® packs the key nutrients that crops need into every single granule. Every plant gets balanced nutrition, across the entire field.
For more information on soil testing and soil fertility, visit Mosaic®’s resource library at CropNutrition.com.
