Air February 13, 2002

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. You can still make it to the corn production school being held at Milford today. We will be meeting at the Milford City building from 9:30 AM through about 2 p.m. Don't worry if you haven't pre-registered, we'll have enough soup for everyone for lunch and some great speakers on the agenda. We're going to be hitting fertility, insect pest management, weed control and some of the new management concepts, plus a very little bit about diseases. A week from tomorrow night there will also be a leased hunting program at Clay Center. This is an early start, 6 PM in the evening. Pizza and soda will be available for a nominal fee. I plan to go so give me a call if you are interested in riding along.

I want to follow up to some of the comments I made last week regarding fertility management in crop production. We all know that if given a certain fertility level in soils, we can improve crop performance with the addition of certain fertilizer inputs. And over the years, most crop producers have developed a pretty standard fertilizer treatment for their crops. Unfortunately, most of these fertilizer rates are based on history not on hoped for outcomes. We know pretty well how, for example, how much nitrogen we need to produce a bushel of corn, or wheat or grain sorghum. If we know what the residual soil nitrate level is, how much organic matter is in the soil, how much manure was applied, we can quickly calculate how much nitrogen we need for a desired crop production level. A 60 bushel wheat crop needs 105 pounds of total nitrogen. If you apply 65 pounds of nitrogen and have 15 ponds of residual nitrogen in the soil, you aren't going to reach that 60 bushel goal. A 100 bushel corn crop needs about 125 pounds of nitrogen. A 90 bushel sorghum crop will need about 120 pounds of nitrogen. I think that we have all too often been under fertilizing our crops because of fear. Fear that the wheat will go down. Fear that we'll have a drought and we'll waste all that extra nitrogen we put on the milo. Fear that we're doing something different than we've done before. You can't manage by fear. You CAN manage risk and you can set yourself up to be successful. Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and all those secondary and micronutrients. We can test for them and we can set up a good aggressive fertility plan. But you have to be willing to try to manage for success!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2002.

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