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SW MN and Gold Canyon AZ | I remember years ago when ridge till was the coming thing. Many ridge tillers quoted Pand K savings by banding. Soon purple corn was showing up.
While using reduced rates may be profitable on rented ground that you are unsure of future status, on your owned farms or farms that you know you have long term lease on why would you want to possibly SHORT yourself on N, P or K??Especially P and K!!! With corn prices approaching 4$ and 8$ plus beans a reality why try to be so tight?? On heavy soils the P and K is not going anywhere. Use university recomendations as to removal rates. After exhaustive soil testing I found those rates are REALLY close. Use recomended rates, soil test and THEN if you are finding the test levels climbing, THEN you can cut back!!!Don't get ahead of yourself and lose yield trying to pinch a few pennies. Once you get behind its hard to get those levels back up without spending a fortune. To me P and K in the soil is like a loan at a bank, if you make a withdrawl you have to replace it with interest!!
I find many who are still using the same rates they did 10 years ago and the yields on corn have gone from the 125 bu area to the 175 average. They are now finding the P levels down in the 5 PPM area!!!They have been robbing the soil bigtime.
If you are fertilizing just in corn DON"T short your beans there needed share!!! To many are treating soybeans as the "Crop after corn"
As far a deep placement of N goes, THIS year on our heavy webster soils if it was fall applied vs sidedress the yield differences are HUGE. It was very dry after sidedress, so that N was TOTALLY wasted. That N will end up in the water table.The fall apllied N corn looks WAY better and was used very effieciently by the plants deeper roots in this dry year. If you have sandy soils then no,fall aplied N is not the way to go. | |
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strip till
