 This is the sugar beet report bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the sugar beet growing season. Pre-pile for sugar beet has begun in some parts of the valley. Right after harvest is the best time to conduct soil sampling according to Dave Frens and NDSU Extension soil science specialist. Dave why is soil testing important at this time of the year? Yeah so for the next month or so the small grains are going to come off the field. There'll be some sugar beet fields that'll come off and I like to see the field sampled as soon as the combine comes across. Not that the nitrate might move a little bit in the value as you go through the fall but unless there's volunteers growing unless there's a lot of growth of some kind it really doesn't change that much. In order to get a very good zero to six inch sample you want to get the soil samples taken before chisel plow goes out there and as soon as that happens then you push the probe in the ground whether it's manual or whether it's usually something out of a pickup truck and it pushes the soil out to the side and so a lot of times you're just sampling subsoil instead of the topsoil so if you go out there right after the combine you know you're going to get a zero to six inch core if that's what you're taking you get a zero to six so really strongly urge people to do that. What is the preferred soil sampling method? I think most of the people taking soil samples understand that the zone method of taking the samples is really the way to go you make a zone map using a couple different tools an aerial image or a satellite image soil ec detector em detector multi-year yield maps topography if you can get somebody to do that in a nice manner so you melt at least two of those together and you come up with a zone map you check out with the farmer and and ask him if that looks like their field most of the time they're going to say yes maybe they'll tweak it a little bit and then you go out and take sample usually somewhere around 10 15 cores within the zone and then that zone sample is what you send to the lab and they send you back a map. How big is a zone? The question is how many zones you have in the field so let's say a quarter I think a minimum number of zones would be say three that maybe if you had the higher elevations or the bumps on the landscape not necessarily higher higher elevation elevation and landscape structure to completely different things so three probably minimum and I've heard is I think something like 10 is overkill so usually you're going to get somewhere around three to six zones in the field and that's plenty. What is the benefit of zone sampling? Yeah so a zone sampling gives you as much information as if you went out there and you grid sampled it as a sample on acre which is really expensive to do it even to a two foot depth you can imagine doing three to five cores every acre throughout a 160 acre field and then the next day you'd do another field or a zone sampled field you could do several in a day I'm sure you could but to do a sample on acre grid forget it but you get the same information from his own sample field you get with a sample on acre. Dave is there anything else you'd like to share? This last winter we had a winter where the soil didn't freeze and so the ammonia changed the nitrate all through the winter at a very slow rate and then when spring came and the water ran over the road and ran across the field and flooded certain areas it turns out to the beats in that area in any crop that were in those areas in the eastern part of the state here in the beet grown areas it was really deficient in nitrogen the denitrification was horrible so just a reminder that for at least 40 years the recommendations at NDSU have been that full nitrogen application is not recommended on fields that frequently flood or fields that have a problem with leaching. Thanks Dave our guest has been Dave Franzen NDSU Extension soil science specialist this has been the sugar beet report bringing you the latest information from NDSU throughout the sugar beet growing season