Adopting the 4R Nutrient Stewardship principles of the Right Product, Right Rate, Right Time and Right Place combined with your sustainability goals forms the crop production strategy. Soil sampling is the key to unlocking yield potential on every acre.

Compliance with the 4R audit process and agronomy advice begins with using current soil test results from nothing older than four years to make current nutrient recommendations.

Our recommendation approach to nutrient management

We base our nutrient recommendation on a build, maintain or draw-down basis. When soil sample values are low, we make recommendations greater than crop removal to build soil test levels. When soil tests are at targeted levels, we use maintenance calculations using crop removal values. When soil tests are high, we recommend using a less than crop removal calculation and at times a zero-rate to draw-down soil fertility values to take advantage of over applications from the past. This approach assures that nutrients are neither deficient limiting crop performance nor excessive impacting on the size of your environmental footprint. Optimizing harvested yield and maximizing nutrient use efficiency is the goal.

We offer four main soils sampling programs that work with this recommendation approach:

Composite sampling

Sample on every 25 acres, the maximum sample size for 4R Stewardship compliance. The management unit is 25 acres; the resulting recommendations and rates are based on a single soil report result for that area. It limits the ability to address any field variability at a smaller scale with data.

Grid sampling

Most grid sampling is done and recommended at 2.5-acre grid. It provides greater insight to field variability. It is a good way to inventory nutrient differences across a field landscape. The collected data supports variable rate Lime and Nutrient applications.

Zone Sampling

Zone sampling has evolved from grids once we had access to yield maps and satellite imagery. These additional layers of information helped to define stability of areas within fields that were the same consistent size and shape year over year.  This made more intuitive sense to farmers and agronomist to match soil sampling and soil management to those unique zones. To have a zone it must be stable year over year in size and shape and have attributes that can be measured. If you can measure it you can manage it. Things that can be measured tend to get managed. The zone map is made ahead of time in our GIS software system and is sent to our soil sample operator to guide them to the designated areas to be sampled. All soil sample values are assigned to the management zones which in turn become the application zones that drive variable rate applications. The only other consideration is to realize that other soil attributes can emerge over time within larger zones and may require additional zones by added and sampled in subsequent years.

Using Your Yield Data

With all of these approaches and our data management system we can incorporate your yield maps into the site-specific recommendations to represent the actual yields rather than assign an average yield value for the field. It adds value to your yield data by replacing nutrients with greater precision in a variable rate scenario.

Fertilizer Technology

Managing Nitrogen as a System

Managing nitrogen is complex we make it easy. Leading agronomic Nitrogen recommendations supported by our yearly benchmark Nitrate Nitrogen sentinel plots that guide our yearly recommendation strategies. Further supported by split applications and expert advice on utilization of Nitrogen Stabilizers.

applying required essential micronutrients to blended fertilizer to support higher yield potentials.

A brief video on MESZ