Soybean fertilizer recommendations: What to keep in mind
University of Minnesota nutrient management specialist Daniel Kaiser talks with the Linder Farm Network about soybean fertilizer recommendations.
TRANSCRIPT
Linder Farm Network: It’s time for the AFREC spotlight, the Agricultural Fertilizer Research and Education Council with Dan Kaiser, University of Minnesota nutrient management specialist. Dan, what recommendations do you have when it comes to fertilization of soybeans?
Dan Kaiser: Well, you know, this is really an interesting topic because, you know, we see more emphasis on pushing fertility directly to soybeans to increase yield. And, you know, the thing that I’ve really been stressing to a lot of growers as of late is you can overfertilize soybean. I mean, we’ve seen it pretty consistently with potash where direct applications, if you look at what soybean actually removes, so like an 80 bushel crop will remove roughly 90 pounds K2O that applying that high of a rate for removal directly out of beans, I’ve seen pretty consistently where yield reductions have been pretty common across the southern part of Minnesota. It’s maybe only a bushel, but still with the amount you’re spending on fertilizer, mean really getting a bushel loss is just, you’ve got a double negative going on there. So that’s kind of the big thing that you just have to watch out.
And really what I recommend with soybean is really taking care of the fertility ahead of the corn. If you’ve got your soil tests kind of in that high soil test range for most of your P and K, in many cases, there really is no direct benefit. And a lot of times I see with really high fertility levels and high rates of fertilizer being pushed to soybeans that whether it’s phosphorus, sulfur, nitrogen or potassium that we can see just some small yield reductions. So it’s just one of the things really, I think, at where if we’re looking at cost savings, you know, saving that application fee in that soybean year, if you have everything taken care of upfront of that, that’s really the best thing you can do because, you know, some of the highest soybean yields I’ve had have been situations where we’ve had greater years between the beans, like three years corn and soybean. And the fertility wise where we’ve been looking at even with low versus high fertility, there isn’t that high of a yield response.
And the biggest difference really to push those higher yields is managing a few other things like diseases or weeds, those types of things, and fertility, just directly ahead of it, I just haven’t seen as big of a benefit.
LFN: That’s our AFREC update. Visit mnSoilFertility.com.