Soil sampling: Step 1 in your nutrient plan
It goes without saying that a good crop nutrition plan starts with finding out what nutrients are already ready and waiting in the soil. The nutrient reserves there serve as a baseline for the macro- and micronutrient levels accessible to your crop over the year.
The key word is "baseline". Soil nutrient levels change over time, depending on what crop was last grown on a field, if there has been drought, flooding or fire and so on.
Collecting soils samples annually for two to three years will give you a good baseline measure of what nutrients are in the soil, and how those levels may or may not vary across the field. Once you know that, you can build a crop nutrition plan that makes sense for your crop throughout the year.
The quality of this baseline knowledge, and therefore its reliability, depends entirely on getting good, accurate soil samples from across the field. Things to consider include:
- Field topography – have a strategy to cover all growing areas.
- Sampling depth – samples taken from 6, 12 and 24 inches provide the most comprehensive results.
- Equipment – coring tools vs. corkscrew-type tools.
- Timing – fall sampling just before freeze up is as reliable as spring sampling.
Build a year-round nutrient management plan
Plants need certain nutrients at different stages during their life cycle. Design your nutrient management program to ensure your crop gets what it needs, when it needs it and where it needs it.
Germination and emergence. Proper soil sampling gives you the broad strokes in terms of what the crop needs to get out of the ground and get going. If soil testing indicates some nutrients are missing or are not in a plant-available form, use a seed-applied micronutrient product that can place nutrients right on the seed in a soluble form.
Early plant development. Plants use a lot of energy through their vegetative period and physical signs of nutrient deficiency, such as wilting or yellowing, are very similar to signs of disease. This can lead to potentially costly misdiagnoses – something that can be avoided entirely when your nutrient plan includes foliar-applied micronutrients.
Magnify, for example, applied at herbicide timing helps maximize root and seedling development and prevent seedlings from stalling due to environmental factors, like cold weather, and reduces the chance of a misdiagnosis.
Flower and seed set. At this stage, plants use less water, which means that the soil nutrients you tested for early in the season are not as available to the plant. Getting essential nutrients to the reproductive parts at the top of a plant can boost flowering and seed set. That means applying nutrients to the leaves, where they're in the right place to be more useable to the plant when it needs them.
A solid crop nutrition plan starts with proper soil sampling and knowing what your baseline soil nutrient levels are. Use that information to build a season-long nutrient plan that accounts for what your plants need, when they need it and where they need it.
Did you know: UFA offer soil sampling and tissue testing with our exclusive Nutriscan technology. Ask your customer account manager to help you with soil assessment today.