| GrainTrader - 11/19/2023 18:40 There is a prominent farm family witching a hours drive of me that is supposedly applying no dry fertilizer more often then not due to cost and ROI. Now I believe they started off with decent levels, but hearing them talk always makes me wonder why more are not doing ROI studies on applying Removal levels vs nothing or almost nothing. I’m not advocating this necessarily, but on my 1200 acres that I hope to make $100,000+ a year on in salary and net worth gain, I spend another $100,000++ on dry fertilizer a year and have never taken the time to study it vs nothing applied scientifically…
Problem is, it's almost an impossible thing to actually measure with massively varying weather patterns and soil types and weed/insect/disease pressures and whatever other variable you can think of.
That said, now I've been fixing enough places with my tile plow that I have eliminated many acres where excessive water, late or replanting, crappy stand, so forth was the limiting factor. Some of those acres weren't going to raise any more bushels if you tipped a train car full of potash over on them. Now I've made them so they will be planted timely and have a picked fence stand, I believe I am running up against fertilizer and other things being the limiting factor. I've got a field right at home in mind that is pattern tiled on 30' from corner to corner (which was such a swamp my entire life that 2012 was the second-highest yield map until this year) I think I am going to start creating zones in maybe the lowest yield 25% or something of it and go to those areas with some more intensive soil sampling, andtissue tests of growing crop.
Will have to sit down and spend some snowy day time digging into yield maps, but seems pretty evident to me still where horse-drawn manure spreaders a century ago got pulled from the farmsteads until they ran empty. |
Let’s talk removal rates
