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Rolla, ND | Jack,
You probably have a manager that figured what it costs him to soil test and then adds a little for margin. Over the years, I have seen a lot of cheap soil testers, a fews things tend to happen with them. They quit when they have to buy new equipment and there isn't any money to do it. Or they do a bad job just to get enough samples to make money. If they are actually trying to do a good job in North Dakota with the hydralic equipment requirements and the time it takes to do a good job, they might be a little bit higher than they would have to be, but not much. People who don't figure costs for doing jobs are a big reason you've seen so much consolidation in the industry. Note that I bet a lot of guys in your area don't have too much problem with paying close to $4 an acre to have a guy custom spray. It's harder to run the equipment spraying but it's a lot easier to do a good spray job than take a good sample. The sprayer just needs to spray the whole field, the sampler has to know enough to take a good sample while avoiding all the bad spots. I gps all my points so we keep coming back and doing as much the same sample year after year as possible.
The guys talking about taking a topsoil sample out east aren't comparing apples to apples, you could just as well ask someone what they pay to have cotton picked and compare it to combining wheat. The length of time they sample, the depth of sampling and so on are all big time different. It would be closer if you subtracted the lab costs and took sampling charges to be at least 3 to 1, probably 4.
There are a lot of ways to cut corners, most common is not taking the 20 cores that everyone says they are. An awful lot of people think running the probe up and down 20 times equals 20 cores, they must live in heaven, not North Dakota. Looking at the samples coming in to the labs, I actually would say the majority aren't doing a good job, their sample size is just too small. Some people mix their samples before they send them, but most don't and most just don't have many cores in their bags.
A real common way to cut corners in our area is to use the Concord samplers. The big problem is that they do everything well except taking a good sample. They plug or hit a rock or something and there is only enough soil to be 20 cores under the very best soil testing conditions. You can tell if the soil is sampling well, they should stop and empty the sampler and then finish the field. For the size tips they have, they never seem to get enough soil.
Now the newer ones with cleaning and lubing between every sample do a better job, but it's still a mystery to the driver, he doesn't see the cores coming in and he just runs it up and down 20 times and calls it good. I don't know if you have any rocks or anything in your area, but in handling our samples, I would say, on the average, in good conditions, I have to take 23 or 24 to get 20 good ones, throwing out the poor ones. This is with me getting feedback from every core as to whether the tip is working. Some falls I spend a lot of time working over tips with files trying to get one to work. In addition to rocks, a clump of straw will make a poor core and I end up using the tip to push residue away, the Concord just punches whereever it is.
The newer Concord lets the hydralic raise so much and then it takes that as the topsoil and the rest goes into the subsoil. Due to hitting rocks and such where you can only go in part way, you still get topsoil in the subsoil sample. Anytime the column of soil isn't full height there is a problem, and there is no way to inspect the core before saving it. The older ones people did an even worse thing, because they need a sample for P, K, and so on in addition to N, they open up their sampler and just grab some of the black soil as the topsoil sample. This sends me absolutely ballistic but for some reason farmers don't seem to pay any attention. Test results, as you know, aren't really read in lbs, they are simply a ppm reading on a particular sample. The labs just do one ppm x (depth of soil in inches divided by three) = lbs. So normally we say topsoil is 6 inches. That means lbs NO3 equals ppm x 2. The rest is normally to 24 inches less the 6 is 18 so the multiplier is 6 for subsoil. Now normally the topsoil when we are testing is higher (not always) because that nitrogen that gets produced after the spring crops is concentrated there. If you leave enough topsoil in the subsoil to raise the test say 5 ppm, that translates into a test that claims 30 lbs of nitrate there that isn't there. I've had many times that guys call me and I find out that a guy with a Concord has sampled and said their fields all have 80 to over 100 lbs of Nitrate and when I sample they test 25 to 30. Those Concords have cost me a lot of business and I don't own one. I really wish they would work because it would be a lot easier on me, but they don't.
So if the guy is actually doing a good job sampling, he really isn't out of line on his prices. If he's flying low over your field with some guy that doesn't know what he's doing or if he's got a Concord, it wouldn't matter if it was free, you can't afford him.
Take some pictures of his outfit and post them. I could tell you whether he at least could do a good job.
Marv | |
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Soil Test Costs ?
