MAX Yield System – Part 3

MAX Yield System – Part 3

Welcome to the EZ Ag podcast where innovative farming meets practical solutions. Before we dig into today’s topic, a quick shout out to say thank you to our listeners, please take a moment to like and subscribe to the EZ Ag podcast so you never miss another episode. Now, let’s get to it. 

So jumping in here, on the third part of the MAX Yield System, today we’re going to talk about the fertility plan. And I wanted to ask you something, have you ever driven a vehicle with no gas gauge? That’s what fertility planning is like, if you don’t soil test. You need gas when you’re driving that vehicle, you just don’t know when, and you don’t really know how much. And so the natural tendency when you’re driving a vehicle with no gas gauge, to fill it up every time you stop at a gas station, or to fill it up every morning, or just to fill it up and fill it up and fill it up every chance you get. While that may work with a vehicle with a gas gauge, the problem you have with fertility planning and making fertilizer applications to a soil is the size of the tank is nearly limitless. You can apply a nearly endless amount of fertilizer to a soil, and when you do that with no knowledge of what you have in the soil, you disrupt natural biological processes and balances that are necessary to grow crops. Some people kind of scratch their head a little bit and they say, “Well, Matt, I’ve been doing a really good job growing a crop by just applying 60 pounds of N or 80 pounds of N or 100 pounds of N before every wheat crop, before every corn crop.” While that may work, is it the most economical way to go about it? Soil tests are one of the least expensive inputs on a per acre basis out there in farming today. Even some of the more advanced testing that I do with some zones or using testing through Agronomy365 from BW Fusion, where you really get an in depth look at what you have in your soil there. We’re looking at an investment of maybe $1 to $3 an acre, versus almost everything else you use on the farm being substantially more expensive than that. I really want to talk to you guys today about fertility planning, about things that we’re looking at on these soil tests to help us make these decisions. What you’re doing with fertility planning is really you’re just making an educated guess. So we’re going to jump back and we’re going to look at some information from that crop plan in your MAX Yield System, and that’s going to help us identify some of what we need to do in the fertility plan here. 

So first thing we’re going to do, we’re going to go out there, we’re going to take a soil test. We’re going to look at the levels that we have in there. There’s different labs that you can use. You can jump back to one of our earlier episodes where I talked specifically about soil testing, about how to use soil tests and get consistent results from them, or results that create consistency in your program, and use that information now in your fertility plan, along with information from your crop plan. The information we need from the crop plan is really when we’re looking at this fertility planning on a field by field basis, we’re going to look at your APH of the crop that you’re planning to grow, and then what your bushels per 1000 goal is, if you’re growing corn, or what your yield goal maybe is on this field, that’s going to be an important piece on making this fertility plan, along with the information that you get back out of your soil test. I’m a big believer that we apply fertilizer based on the bushels per 1000 or yield goal that we have for this field or for a zone in a field, if we’re working with zone sampling here and zone application, but you use that information to make that recommendation. One of the things that I think we’ve got to be cognizant of is, like I was talking about in that gas tank, is we don’t want to over apply year after year after year and disrupt some of those natural processes that go on in the soil and that balance that’s in the soil, because a balanced soil has the ability to release soil nutrients to a crop at a faster rate and at a more balanced rate for what that crops need actually is, because all of the fertility that ends up in a crop goes through a biological process, and those biological processes function better when your soil chemistry is in balance. 

Let’s talk a little bit about nitrogen. That seems to be the biggest one that all of us are using to grow a crop. So let’s talk about N, and let’s talk about how much N do we actually need? I’ve got different theories on this. I’ve been doing some different things on my own farm, and just looking at my soil test results year after year. I think what we need to grow a dry land crop is actually substantially less than what most people believe. The reason I say that is, I’m using that advanced soil testing through Agronomy365 and you look at some of the numbers coming back out of those soil reports, and it might say that I have, we’ll say, 50 pounds of N available and I always take a 0 to 6 sample, and then I take a 6 to 24 to look at nitrate. So I’ve got 50 pounds of nitrate available to my crop. I’m going to credit that back into that calculation of how much nitrogen I need. But then later, in that same test result I might see that I have, a soil that is going to naturally release nitrogen throughout the year. Every soil goes through this warming and cooling effect and wetting and drying effect in the biological processes of that soil speed up or slow down based on how warm it is and how wet it is. In that process, you have natural breakdown of organic matter in your soil and when you have that natural breakdown of that organic matter in your soil, guess what it’s doing? It’s releasing free nitrogen to you. So I want to take into account that estimated nitrogen release, or ENR, as it’s reported on the soil test in my calculation. Some guys say, “Well, you know what, if you have a really wet year Matt and you grow a crop way better than you’re expecting, are you going to leave yourself short by crediting all this nitrogen and all this estimated nitrogen release off your soil test?” What I tell you is, the answer is, probably no. And the other answer is, if it does happen, there’s things you can do in season to overcome it. Let’s kind of analyze two pieces of that. The reason the answer is probably no is because the wetter and and warmer it is, to an extent, we’re not talking about extremely hot, but the wetter and the warmer that soil gets, the more nitrogen it’s going to release from that soil organic matter. So when we have these years where we have ideal conditions to grow a really phenomenal crop, our soil is pumping the nitrogen out naturally. When we have the years where it’s just hot and dry and we’re not growing a crop, guess what? The soil is not giving up the nitrogen either, and it’s holding on to that organic matter and because it’s holding on to that organic matter, you’re not losing anything, and there’s really nothing to gain, because the weather isn’t conducive to growing that big crop anyways. So some people would sit back and say, “whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don’t want to mine my soil.” Well, guys, I’m here to tell you that the soil is naturally giving this up; you’re not mining it. Nitrogen is an element that’s free in the soil. It’s one that is going to move out of the soil profile with rainfall, it’s going to be given off as a gas. If you’re doing tillage, it’s one that you want to take advantage of. If your soil is naturally producing nitrogen, you want to take advantage of it. The soil is a terrible place to store nitrogen, and that’s just all there is to it. Some people would challenge me on that assumption, some people say, “Hey, we live in an arid environment, and we don’t have leaching, we don’t have nitrogen loss in our soil because we don’t get enough rainfall.” I’m here to tell you guys, if you ever pulled deep soil samples, three foot, four foot deep samples, and sent them to the lab, had the nitrogen analysis done on it, guess what? There’s nitrogen there. Have you ever applied nitrogen three and four feet deep? No, nobody does. You can’t. So how did the nitrogen get there? Some say, well, it just naturally occurs. No, it doesn’t. Biological activity only happens in about the top seven inches of the soil, because air really can’t get below that to allow that biological process to happen. All the biology in the soil is between the surface and the depth that your fence posts rot, and that’s where all of the nutrients in the soil are produced. If you find the nutrients deeper in the soil, if you’re finding nitrogen at two foot, nitrogen at three foot, nitrogen at four foot deep, by doing a really deep sample, it’s because it has leached there. We know from studies that universities do, anytime a soil is at 60% or greater of field capacity, field capacity being the most amount of water that a soil can hold before runoff or leaching occurs, if a soil is at 60% of field capacity or more, there is loss of water below the ridding depth of the soil so it starts leaking out the bottom anytime it’s greater than 60% of field capacity. So if you have water loss, you have loss of nutrients in that water and nitrogen moves in water, so does sulfur. When nitrogen moves, it takes calcium with it, and that’s why, especially in our no till soils, you’ll see that you have a lower calcium in the topsoil than you have in the subsoil, because when that nitrogen is leaching out of that topsoil with rainfall, it’s taking calcium with it, and it’s taking it down into the subsoil. So there’s things that our soil test can teach us. There’s things that we know about how nutrients work within the soil. We’ve got to use that in our fertility planning and use the information that’s available to us through that soil testing. So kind of a little bit of a dive into fertility planning today and why we need to use soil testing as part of it. In the next episode, I’m going to talk about the fertility plan again, and I’m going to get specific on what my recommendations are on nitrogen and phosphorus, sulfur, zinc and other micros that you need to grow that top crop of corn this next year. So fertility planting, it all starts with soil testing, because you have to have a gauge to know how much to put in.

That’s all for today. I’m Matt Long. Thanks for joining us on this episode of EZ Ag. Grow your yield. Grow your legacy. Grow strong with Axis Seed, thank you!