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| I think you can have others do your sampling if they do a consistent job, but it's becoming more apparent to me that sampling needs to be done by soil type and you need more than just P,K and pH. I've had grid sampling done for several years and find that though my soil tests are fantastic, my yields on some fields have lagged behind. Fertility is not the only factor, but I started having soil tests done by soil type and got complete tests with CEC, base saturation, and other factors and it appears my grid sampling results were lacking the information I really needed. I'm going to be adding lime to a field that is ok for pH, but it's base saturation is off. The guy I have doing the testing is one of the 'soil balance' type consultants and I think there are lots of different names for this type of service, but it looks at more factors that affect nutrient availability and use soil type as a guide to make recommendations (which can vary considerably from the one size fits all UofI agronomy handbook that I had been using).
I feel this is a step in the right direction and certainly makes more sense to me than just throwing on 200/200 and add lime to make it 6.5 and see what happens. Hopefully, I'll get a few things corrected and get better yields where I was having problems.
Another opinion,
Thanks,
Pat | |
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Soil test
