Air January 21, 2004

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone.

A quick reminder of the pasture lease meeting, tomorrow night January 22 at the 4-H/Sr. Citizens Building starting at 7 p.m. No charge and plan on a great meeting.

A lot of producers are busy working on their crop production plans for the coming year. Wheat's in the ground but may still need to have weed control and fertilizer yet to be applied. For the spring seeded crops, seed is being bought to lock in early bird discounts and probably an effort is being made to lock in some fertilizer before the price goes any higher! One of the questions that comes up every time the fertilizer price goes up is how much do I reduce application rates. There is an incorrect assumption that optimum fertilizer application rates change with the price of fertilizer. That as the price goes up or down, the optimum application rate moves in an opposite direction. WRONG! The truth is that optimum fertilizer rates from an agronomic or crop production perspective have nothing to do with prices. Optimum fertilizer rates occur at that point where increasing yield starts to diminish. You can still get more yield, it just takes more fertilizer to get there. IT involves some kind of economic theory about marginal returns or something like that. But the bottom line is that if you need 90 pounds of nitrogen to optimize wheat yield, it doesn't matter much if it costs 10 or 15 or 20 cents per pound of nitrogen. In fact reducing application rates because of higher prices can actually increase your per bushel cost of production.

This year we have the added challenge, again, of following a drought year. Based on the good wheat yields we can't expect much residual nitrogen there. And because of good early season growth in the fall harvested crops, there may not be as much residual N as you think, given the yields. But the only way to know that for sure, is to pull some 18 to 24 inch deep soil samples and let's get some soil tests done for profile nitrogen. If it's there, let's don't buy more than we need. If it isn't there, let's make sure that we are putting enough on to get those optimal yields!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2004.

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