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Thumb of Michigan | Bill, I've had quite a few farmers over the years tell me they thought the liquid programs (using 10-34-00, 8-25-3, etc) were better yielders, especially in dryer years. The most recent guy who told me that was a dry user, and was over looking for ideas on converting to liquid. I don't remember where the last sort of scientific study I saw on that is now. I also don't know if the liquid vs dry thing is a local sort of phenominon or not. Lots of variables to be thought over I suppose. We were lucky in this area in that we had a heck of a good fert guy (Don Volk) in Akron. He'd sell either dry or liquid, and had so much more experiance than many others we knew at the time. Don had forgotten more about fert than I'll ever hope to know. With all that said, I agree 100% that a pound is a pound, at least to start the discussion. The guys who are selling the 1 qt = 1 gal of phos poly stuff are a little suspect to me. Again, depends on what you're trying to achieve I guess.
We went to liquid in the late 70's. Economics was the big driver, even though the liquid was a tad more on a # per # comparison to dry then. Reason # 1 was that our dry fert storage (the barn) needed a roof. We needed to replace it with at least a 3 bay shed of some sort or another. Problem # 2 was capacity on the planter. Not a real good way to carry enough fert to really capitalize on the planter's ability to cover ground. Reason #3 was that there were a lot of 15-30K tanks available used at the time, and they were an awful lot less to put up per ton than was dry storage. #4 was that we had a few liquid plants in Michigan where we could get product at a freight advantage, and we were getting 32% in by ship fairly close to me. #5 was that we could easily (using plastic tanks) haul a lot more product to the field than we'd previously been able to. Lots of that has changed now because of better dry equiptment, but I still like liquid. We get by very well with an occasional broadcast of potash on our soils. It's be a whole lot different if we needed to apply a lot of K at planting, though. Dry would be the clear winner in that circumstatnce I think.
I don't think that strip till w/ a nutrient application or placing fert with the planter is a whole lot different. Nothing magic happens that manufactures nutrients. Its just a much, much more efficient way to apply nutrients vs tossing it on broadcast and hoping for the best. I think many times theres some failures with no till because of poor fertilizer application choices. I've read some studies that credit strip till with yield increases when really it was a better fertilizer application method that probably increased yields.
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Liquid fertilizers???
