Does tiling affect your fertilizer management plan? A research update from the Red River Valley.

Northwest Research and Outreach Center specialist Lindsay Pease talks with the Red River Farm Network about the latest research into whether tiled ground affects your fertilizer management plan.

Transcript

Red River Farm Network: This is the Soil Fertility Minute brought to you by the Agricultural Fertilizer Research and Education Council. Our guest is University of Minnesota Extension Northwest Research and Outreach Center specialist doctor Lindsay Pease.

Lindsay Pease: One of the research questions we’ve been tracking in Crookston is whether adding tile allows you to change your soil fertility plan. We’ve heard arguments on both sides whether tiling means increased or decreased nitrogen rate, but so far, we’ve not seen every evidence to change the fertilizer plan at all for tiled ground.

The amount of nitrogen that leaves the field with drainage is pretty minimal to what you’re applying, so there isn’t a reason to adjust there. And in the first five years after our drainage installation, we also haven’t seen any big changes in microbial activity that’s affecting the nitrogen that’s in the field.

But we’ll definitely be checking this again after all of the rain we saw late in this growing season, including any losses between harvest and soil freeze up.

And we’ll continue to update as we have new results.

RRFN: AFREC is a farmer led program advancing soil fertility research.