I attended Agvise‘s Soil Fertility Seminar in Carman on March 18. I learned a lot of interesting stuff.
John Lee’s talk on Secondary and Micronutrients gave me some good pointers for situations in which to look for micronutrient deficiencies. For example, a copper deficiency is likely when the soil test is < 0.5 ppm, % organic matter is < 2.5% on sandy loam or % organic matter is higher than 15%, and when sensitive crops such as wheat or barley are planted.
A lot of Rigas Karamanos’ talk was on the efficacy of broadcast and incorporated copper versus other copper products. (Quick summary, use broadcast and incorporated copper.) The point that I found particularly interesting was that for micronutrients you don’t see a response curve. Either you get a response or you don’t. E.g. if your wheat crop needs 5 ppm of copper and you give it 4, you get no yield increase; if you give it 6 and it needs 5 you won’t get an increase any greater than you would have gotten with 5.
Tom Jensen discussed the Environmental Farm Plans. If you don’t have one, you should – it’s a good way of getting paid back for improvements you’re probably going to make anyway.
The main thrust of John Heard’s talk on solving field nutritional mysteries was “Look for patterns in the crop.” Often looking at patterns of good and poor growth then discussing pact practices with the farmer can bring valuable clues to light. He also discussed calculators for fine tuning of N guidelines.
Kelly Sharpe’s presentation was pretty much the same one he gave at the Agronomist’s conference. Make sure to keep trying tweaking the system and evaluating the results.
John Lee closed out the afternoon with a talk on a project Agvise started in 2008 where they’re trying to reclaim sodic areas in a field through the use of gypsum. So far it looks somewhat promising, but they don’t expect dramatic results till roughly 2013, so we’ll check back then.
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