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Thumb of Michigan | Bill, I'm familiar with the Alpine product. My opinion has always been that its a very high quality product. Outside of some company people, I've only really talked to a couple of sales people long ago. I like to think that mt BS sensors are set on high, they didn't go off talking to those folks at all. I won't say that with some other fert sales people, and I'll just leave that alone.
The extra time it takes to fill is always the first thing brought up. I'll admit that our planting operation requires 2 people. But then, it always has. We've been able to match our fertilizer capacity to the seed capacity, so we fill the fert and the seed at the same time. Our goal is to fill seed and fert in under 10 minutes per stop. Not always doable, but thats what we shoot for. For corn, I'm applying 32 to 35 gpa of stuff. Soys are down around 8-12 gpa, so tha gets filled every third seed fill or so. My limiting factor is seed carrying capacity, not fert. We start the fert pump, start filling seed, and usually I have time for a 2 or 3 minute walk around before the fert's done filling after the seeds in. My dad stays busy enough between fills moving trucks, getting seed, and checking the planter operation. Nothing magic here, just that the fert deal doesn't have to be excessivelly slow.
Economically, cutting a trip out of the operation by planting and fertilizing makes sense. Agonomically, I still stand by my no-till failure comment in another post. For corn, I believe that a MINIMUM of 25# of N needs to go on at planting. I've applied as much as 150# at planting, but have since backed off to 65#. May as well throw some starter in the mix as long as you're making the effort. I know some folks who've had long term success with either 10-34-00 beside the row, or a starter on top of the seed like you suggest, Bill. My point is that I believe pretty strongly that in a lot of cases, the most profitable thing to do is combine the 2 trips. As I said before, my job isn't nessesarily to cover x number of acres per day, its to grow a cheap bu. or # of something. If covering lots of acres per day is the number 1 goal, all a guy has to do is lower his seeding rate. I mean heck, if 200 acres a day is the limit dropping 32K seeds/acre, think about the bragging rights that go along with only dropping 10K seeds/acre! And at that seeding rate, 8 or 10 mph should be very achievable with a planter. But I'll bet that no one does that. I know thats an extreme example, but the concept is the same to me by not looking at the fertiler side of things when planting. Might not be applicable everywhere, but I think it needs to be looked at in a lot of situations.
There a very, very sharp lad north of me who's always been an early adopter of technology, as is his dad. His rotation is 2/3 soy, 1/3 wheat. He went from a pair of 750 Deeres to a Yielder drill a few years back. The new drill was setup to split fert at different depths and locations to the seed. He felt he could get enough of a yield increase by placing fert a little more accurately. He was almost shocked at the response he got, especially in wheat. He won't go to the field with the drill without starter now. His multi year plot work shows that they're leaving too many bu. on the table by broadcasting all the fert. And his dad hated the thought of dragging another truck to the field at planting time. Doesn't mind it now, even though he has to drag more trucks to the field at harvest. Thats a good thing.
Hay, I'm always intersted in your posts about high pH and fert. We have some on the higher side, but nothing like yours. We don't have a real high CEC however- 10-12 catches a lot of it. And the OM is on the low side. No-till is kind of reversing the OM thing, but not as fast as I'd like. Most of our farm is old lakebed soils. Your area sounds like it would have been tough to sell fertilizer in for a lot of years! We've been planting a lot of high fert use crops for many years here, potash application has been fairly common as long as I can remember. P has been over applied for as long as I can remember, also. But a little of that close to the seed in the spring still helps the crop get going it seems like.
Enough about all of that- my response to the original post is that I like liquids better than dry. If that matters to anyone. Sounds like Bill has the data to back up my opinion, so I don't have to look for anything to back it up! | |
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liquid fertilizer vs dry
