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ecmn | Russell Hendricks had a great slide in a presentation that showed direct injected liquid used 1/5 the amount of fertilizer as dry broadcast and made tremendously more yield. But he's kind of at a different level than most of us
Liquid has a lot of advantages but I would compare it and see what's available in your area. You can band dry as well and gain a tremendous amount of efficiency
Liquid doesn't necessarily better. Research the products that you're buying
Again, an actual in-season nutrient management program based off of sap testing soil testing the time of year, the history of the field, the long-range forecast, growth stage of the plant.... You can find deficiencies, or over applications that might have been yield limiting. You might not see any savings in that kind of field, but you might see that. Oh I was spending way too much money on nitrogen and potassium when everything is looking really good there, but I need to move that money over to micronutrients. Who knows. Maybe all the testing shows that you're just simply over applying or putting it out at the wrong time and by changing your timing/placement you were able to reduce a lot of your input dollars.
I've been trying to learn this for a lot of years and last year was one of my best corn crops with some of the lowest bulk fertilizer applied.
After seeing how our crops responded in the neighborhood to the year we had last year, I have a lot more confidence that with a little fine tuning. I can grow a tremendous crop this year, with a gallon of a phosphorus and potassium product and my goal would be to try to get around that 6/10 of a pound of nitrogen applied per bushel.
The even more confusing part of this, is that this past season with tremendously less purchased inputs. The soil test still moved up very positively. Will soil test again this spring to see if it maintained or did everything move back into our P2 category or the unavailable pool of potassium? | |
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Liquid Fertilizer ?
