|
Little River, TX | A good bit has been learned the hard way.
Just looking at fertility, and testing. It was a long climb to learn that soil testing that worked in East Texas, or Ohio the chemistry is wrong for these 8 pH calcareous, heavy clay, Vertical, 50 measured CEC soil.
Here and there I read of normal variability in soil testing in the 30% range. The Labs, for the testing we are paying for, will consistently be within 10% variability. The Labs like to point fingers at the sampling errors, for the remainder of the variability. Then I looked at some information from Oklahoma and realized there is a large variability in soil fertility. In the square foot to square foot range.
Check http://www.ipni.net/ppiweb/bcrops.nsf/$webindex/456AC491E25BE4F5852...
Much the same data has been found with other crops and other states.
I number of years ago I was fortunate enough to visit with a forthright Soils, Ph. D.. It was this kind gentleman who clued me in on not expecting useful information for the Micronutrients, simply because they are diluted too much.
Along the way I have read that the same applies to Agricultural Levels of Sulfur. Think about it the ppm of Sulfur is also about the same as that for phosphate. Phosphate is really tricky. Depending on the soil pH the chemistry used to extract the Available Phosphate the data can be completely unreliable.
Thee you are probably fortunate as Bray or Mehlich chemistry works just fine on mildly acid soil.
http://www.ipni.net/ppiweb/bcrops.nsf
is my favorite place to look at fertility.
Other times I just run a search on fertility>Crop's name and start reading. The crops I look at are bermudagrass, or alfalfa. Never was interested in corn, or other program crop, except for how they related to hay crops.
I got to digging, only because all the information directed toward us came from acid sandy soils and eventually we noticed the information was really bad.
| |
|
Thin Alfalfa, thick brome hay question
