Year after year, fertilizer is the big gorilla in the room when it comes to farm expenditures. In 2014, the readers of No-Till Farmer spent an average of $85,513 per farm to feed their crops — far outpacing the average of $69,732 spent on average, per farm, for land rent.
Essential in all plants but needed only in small doses, no-tillers must identify a crop’s proper copper need to protect cell development and grain production.
While copper is present in most U.S. soils, it is often tied up and unavailable to plants. It’s an essential micronutrient involved in many cellular reactions in plant cells. But at high levels, copper can be detrimental to plant development.
A Purdue University study shows that high-yielding, modern corn hybrids take up not only more nitrogen from soil but more micronutrients such as zinc, iron, manganese and copper. Nitrogen fertilizer rates also influence how much of these nutrients are stored in the grain at harvest.
When no-tillers are struggling to climb over a plateau in their crop yields, their first step should be finding out what’s happening with the nutrient balance and biological activity in their fields.
Sometimes it's not the hybrid, it’s the farmer or subtle weather conditions that are the reason yields weren’t the best that they could be. Too many times, I see producers abandon a perfectly good hybrid or variety without understanding why it performed the way it did that season.
Mastering the A, B, Cs of soil fertility means managing nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium first, then taking care of secondary nutrients and micronutrient levels, a soil-testing expert says.
When no-tillers get the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium levels in their fields at optimum levels to maximize yields, they need to focus on secondary and micronutrients, says Ray Ward, owner of Ward Laboratories Inc. in Kearney, Neb.
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Capturing sunlight and keeping living roots in the ground as long as possible is the goal of Beaver Dam, Ws., no-tiller Marty Weiss. The co-chair of the Dodge County Farmers for Healthy Soil & Healthy Water talks about strip-cropping and interseeding cover crops at a field day in the summer of 2020.
Needham Ag understands the role of technology in making better use of limited resources within a specific environment by drawing on a wealth of global experience to overcome the challenges facing today's farmers, manufacturers and dealers.
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