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Little River, TX | You can pull hay samples right now, from hay in storage. Trick is knowing what is where and where it came from.
Mineral analysis with hay testing is rough at best. Normally with forage sampling you clip off the top 6 inches of the plant. Hay is the whole plant, & with a little more dust. When I see something that is interesting I compare the results with what forage at that stage is listed to be in Feeds & Feeding Texts.
I normally like to do my Soil & Tissue sampling at the appropriate growth stage going into the second cutting. Every stop for a soil probe I take a clipping. This allows me to compare the two in an apples to apples situation. This year my soil phosphate was listed as high, above 20 ppm using the sodium bicarbonate or Olsen method. The tissue analysis came back showing the Phosphate percentage was on the low side. Things like this make me mistrust soil analysis for high pH high clay content soils.
One thing I do is convert plant nitrogen to crude protein with the plant analysis and CP to nitrogen percentage with the hay samples.
In most cases we have an advantage over the Labs. We know the history of the soil and have a backlog of soil &/or plant analysis. They only have the results in front of them. Say the soil potash just went from low to very high from one time to the next with only minimal if any potash fertilizer.
Expect up to 20% variability from year to year. Unless you have the ability to sample exactly the same spot down to less than one ft². Several states have done what Oklahoma did. They sampled every ft² on a 7 by 70 ft block of bermudagrass. They also took clippings on each little block. The differences were dramatic.
If you have a better background than I, plant analysis interpretation will be easy. After 20 years I continue to learn what I am trying to do. My BS is 55 years old from a State Teachers College, with ever increasing self study over the last 25 years.
Edited by Hay Wilson in TX 10/11/2007 07:35
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Fertilizing for forage
