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East of Broken Bow | Went to an agronomy meeting yesterday, and they discussed biologicals.
First thing the speaker said was that there was essentially NO regulation/safeguards regarding biologicals, that they could make any claim they wanted to, as long as some test plot somewhere came up with those numbers. For example, if they did 100 trials, and 50 showed yield loss, 49 showed yield gain of 1 BPA, and 1 showed a yield gain of 25 BPA, they could freely advertise that 'official trials showed up to 25 BPA yield gain.
Another comment I found interesting was that there were new biological companies/products out every day, in fact more than one per day.
He spoke the most about Pivot Bio, as he commented that they were the most well known. Said that from what he saw, it helped the most on thinner soils that did not hold fertilizer as well, and the better the soils, the better the fertility, and the better the management the less improvement he saw. The biggest improvements were on ground that he said was kind of 'sterile' and low on organic matter, and went on to say that if you had access to manure, they have seen better repeatable results with manure application than any other biological (he considered manure to be in both the fertilizer and biological categories because manure stimulates the biological activity in the ground. He said that in corn from what he's seen with Pivot Bio was that grain yield gains were inconsistent, but vegetive health was improved and silage growers were using it with great success.
Edit to add: He also mentioned that biologicals belong in the furrow, and starter fertilizer is OK to the side, but he was a firm believer that biologicals should be available to the plant when it first sprouts. Sugar with the biologicals sometimes helps, the thought is that it feeds the microbes until the plant is big enough to sustain them.
Edited by HuskerJ 2/8/2024 07:07
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Pivot Bio 14 million for ISU testing
