Fall Ag Liming:
Start with Soil Samples
“This is a recording:
Start with current soil samples,” said Tim Stelter, Federated’s Osceola location manager, with a chuckle, as he started to talk about fall liming. “Whether it’s grid sampling or one sample for 40 acres, it’s more information than we have without a sample,” he added.
Good crop management decisions are based on good information, and that’s where the soil samples come into play. Applying lime on fields in the fall, said Stelter, “will make everything work better”:
- Crops use fertilizer better.
- Soil applied herbicides prevent weeds better.
- Overall soil health is better.
- Yields are better.
“We love applying ag lime in the fall on not-yet-tilled soil,” said Stelter who, like other Federated agronomists, encourages growers to apply lime in the fall, not in the spring when schedules are compressed and the pressure to plant is on.
Ag lime should be applied immediately after the crop is off, before tillage, before the weather turns cold. “It only takes a week to get the soil sample results back and we can be out to spread lime and/or fertilizer quickly; there’s still time for tillage (unless you’re in a no-till situation),” said Stelter.
Yield is the key, Stelter noted. “Even at the low [commodity] prices you still get paid on bushels and the more bushels you get the more you get paid.”
“If you wait until spring, there won’t be time to do it,” he said. He added that variable rate liming is another valuable option – the cost of grid sampling is offset by lime being put only where it’s needed.
Contact your
Federated Agronomist
before you get in the combine to get soil samples done and fall ag liming scheduled.
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Start Fighting Next Year’s White Mold Now
“You can significantly reduce the incidence of white mold and significantly reduce the impact on yield with soil applied biological fungicides applied in the fall,” said Kevin Carlson, Federated’s senior agronomist.
Resting spores of Sclerotinia white mold are in the soil, and they won’t simply go away with winter frost. This is a difficult disease to understand, in some ways, according to Carlson. “It’s a fungus that significantly impacts soybean crops in our area, in our environment.”
Managing white mold is challenging, but not impossible, with the right tools, including:
- row spacing,
- proper plant population,
- using soybean varieties with a tolerance to white mold,
- applying fungicides – both soil-applied (in the fall or spring) and foliar-applied (at flowering).
“Contans® WG fungicide is a powerful tool to reduce the incidence of white mold,” said Carlson. It’s one of the many tools, as noted above, and “if a grower has significant impact on yield from white mold, using Contans in addition to other products [and management tools] can help maintain yields.” (See
Contans WG Fact Sheet
.)
Contans can be sprayed on entire fields or, if growers have an historical record of white mold or combine data that shows where the problems lie, Contans can be spot sprayed once the crop comes off. (See additional info on
Scouting for White Mold.)
If the problem is severe, Federated recommends a Contans use rate of 2 lbs./ac., but most applications are 1-1½ lbs./ac.
“We’ve been using Contans in our area for a number of years, and it works,” said Carlson. “It’s an investment in the crop for the future,” spraying a soil-applied fungicide in the fall, “but it works,” he said.
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Federated Focus: A Service, A Person
Fall Services Lead to Better Spring Productivity
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Craig Peterson has offered friendly service at Federated’s Ogilvie location for over two decades, and for the past 10 years he’s been serving area growers with sound agronomic advice.
His first piece of advice this fall:
Get soil samples. He and the other
Federated Agronomists often sound like broken records with their regular reminders to take soil samples, but “you get the most for your money by knowing what’s in the soil,” said Peterson.
And then, with soil test results in hand, Peterson offers another recommendation for fall:
Apply phosphorous (P) and potassium (K) now. “If we get P and K on in the fall, all we need in the spring is urea and AMS. Each load of fertilizer will cover more acres,” he said.
With unpredictable Minnesota and Wisconsin springs – recalling the 18-inch snowfall in April 2018 – it can make a big difference in how spring plays out, and Peterson’s 25 years of ag experience (coinciding with his 25 years of marriage) are enough to back his claim.
“We have the ability to move product out of the fertilizer plant extremely fast compared to when I first started at Federated,” he said, but there are still only so many hours in a day. Every load of fertilizer applied in the fall when the pressure is off is one less load that will need to be applied in the spring when time is of the essence.
In both fall and spring, growers can have peace of mind that Federated will have the products they need. Peterson said, “We are able to get products out in a timely fashion,” and fall applications of P and K, along with other products such as Gypsoil®, help widen the window for planting in the spring.
Plus, there are product price breaks and discounted application fees in the fall.
Peterson spends a good deal of his time working with precision ag – grid sampling, VRT fertilizer, etc. – and he encourages growers to consider incorporating precision ag technologies into their operations. “It’s good to see the different things on the farm; it’s an interesting piece,” he said, and the economic returns with precision ag are worth exploring.
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