For Release January 9, 2001

AGRI-VIEWS
by Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent

I think we all knew it was coming. After more or less stable or declining prices for nearly two decades, fuel prices have been increasing and no one knows where they’ll land this time. To be very blunt, we have all forgotten a lot of those fuel saving practices. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s household energy, personal vehicle energy use, tractor fuel use or irrigation energy use, we’ve all gotten energy sloppy.

So now we get to go back and dust off those 25 year old bulletins and try to reach back 25 years (for those of us that remember the last time we went through this) and remember all those things we used to do. Many of the things that we can do will achieve small savings. You may wonder why bother with a couple percent savings here and a couple there. But if you are religious about all those little fuel saving practices, you can suddenly save ten or fifteen percent. And that becomes a worthwhile savings!

In private vehicles, remember to accelerate slowly. You don’t have to be up to the speed limit the first 100 feet after the stop light. Likewise, decelerate slowly. Don’t wait until the last minute to hit the brakes. Let the engine, and gravity, slow you down. It’ll also make the other people approaching the intersection a little less nervous about whether you’re going to run that stop sign or not! Out on the road, drive a little less than the speed limit. Driving 65, on the interstate, rather than 70, may just add a mile or two per gallon to your fuel economy.

A lot of the same practices apply to tractors as well. With tractors there are a lot of other things you can do as well. Proper air pressure in the tires and proper weighting or ballasting can make a big difference, and improvement, in your tractor’s performance. I’m sure most producers are now running on radial tractor tires. If not, simply switching to radials can save six to eight percent in fuel consumption. When working with lighter loads, try gearing up and throttling back to save fuel.

Think twice about every tillage operation you perform. Do you really need to disc or field cultivate that stubble field? What will that tillage operation gain you? We have too much recreational tillage that occurs every year. Recreational tillage is tillage that truly serves no purpose, other than to keep the tractor operator busy. If it’s time to buy a new drill or planter, make sure you get one that will handle more residue so that you can get by using less tillage.

With natural gas prices spiking, nitrogen fertilizer prices are going up also. This makes soil testing even more important. You can’t afford not to soil test every field every year with the price of fertilizer. You can get a full soil test, with nitrogen, performed for about ten dollars. How many pounds of nitrogen is that and how many acres are in the field? Even using last year’s prices for dry fertilizer, and assuming a small 40 acre field, that figures out to be one pound of nitrogen per acre. If you could save ten pounds of nitrogen per acre, without hurting yield, you would have a ten to one return on your soil test investment. Don’t waste fertilizer or money, soil test. Remember though, that we need a sample down 18 to 24 inches to get a good account of residual, usable soil nitrogen.

But just making random cuts in inputs can end up cutting yield and costing you money rather than saving money. To help you decide where, when and how to save production costs, mark on your calendar to attend our public meeting, Controlling Crop Production Costs for Increased Profitability, on March 6 at the 4-H/Sr. Citizens Building, starting with a soup supper at 5:30 p.m.

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