I recently ran across this presentation on Soil Survey in Manitoba (PDF) by Sheila Meyer, R. Wu, and Y. Zhang. It provides a very nice introduction to Soil Surveys. The two questions it answers are: What is a Soil Survey? and What are Soil Surveys used for? It’s definitely worth reading. If you need a [...]
I heard about this at a conference today. Veris has a soil probe that uses Near InfraRed to analyze and record soil properties on the fly. It appears that so far they just measure carbon but I can see this being tremendously useful for measuring phosphorous levels across a field. Cliff Loewen and Scott Dick [...]
I’ve seen some searches for an ATV Soil Sampler show up in the site results. I’ve set up a Picasa album with ATV Soil Sampler Pictures. If you have any questions, please let me know.
Garth Donald discusses the nutrients left in the soil in fall 2009. With the way the weather’s been, the nutrients left in the soil are quite variable. Some crops were not planted at all, some were drowned out early on, others were hailed out, and some produced near bumper crops. Trying to predict the nutrients [...]
Reading about Reducing Energy Inputs in the Agricultural Production System really encouraged me. I don’t know how trustworthy David Pimentel’s figures are, but even if they’re off by quite a bit, it shows that there are all kinds of possibilities for improvement in agriculture. At Tone Ag Consulting, we’ve been looking into various possibilities for [...]
Seth Godin recently had a post: What to do with special requests. We’ve had a lot of success with dealing with special requests. In some ways, dealing with special requests, particularly when it comes to rush soil sampling, is one of our niches. We can get out to a field and sample it the same [...]
I spent the day soil sampling. I did it the old fashioned way – working a dutch auger by hand and walking the field. It took a very long time. I only did it that way because our trucks and ATV were elsewhere and this field needed to be done in a hurry. Lots of [...]
With the latest revision to Manitoba’s manure regulations, manure application is restricted on fields with high soil test phosphorus. If a field regularly receives manure on a nitrogen basis, the soil test phosphorus levels will rise. N:P2O5 Ratios The biggest factor in rising soil test phosphorus is the N:P2O5 ratio of the manure versus the [...]
Someone’s called in a tearing hurry – their equipment is standing by in a field that wasn’t soil tested and they need soil test results before they can get going. How quickly can they get a soil test result? Hand Sampling – Slow but picturesque Here at Tone Ag, we can usually take soil samples [...]
Except in laboratory conditions (and maybe not even then), soil tests are not 100% accurate and are subject to a margin of error. The target accuracy is about +/- 15 % with a precision level of about 80%. For example, if you had a field with a nitrogen (N) level of 20 and you sampled [...]
