 I'd like to recognize I am not talking today about microbes in the soil and cover crops and a lot of things like that that we have had covered at previous conferences here. Joel Glover, Glover, I think I get his name right, came and talked on those type of topics a couple of years. This is pretty much focused on basic plant nutrition, you know, knowing what nutrients you have in the soil and then going ahead and trying to respond to those. So that's what the focus is, because it's about plant nutrition. So all those other things are valuable and important to try and do, gradual improvement of your soils, but I'm not gonna go into a lot of depth on that. This is gonna be kind of focused more on the specific nutrients. So in terms of general for vegetable gardening, vegetable growing, we want a good quality soil. That means it's well-drained, it means it's a deep soil. A lot of folks in Missouri struggle with well-drained and deep for vegetable soils, for their soils in general. So a very common way to get around that is to make raised beds to try and help boost that level deeper and that helps offset some of that. So that's why raised beds are very popular. We want to provide the major nutrients and then we want to kind of have a pH in that six zero to six eight range. And then we would like it to get to an organic level of five percent or greater. So five percent or greater on a typical soil in Missouri is not, in terms of organic matter, is not very commonly attained. So you have to work a lot to get your soil up to that. So home gardeners can do that fairly easily by working at the constant addition of the organic matter and such like that. Commercial growers, it gets to be a little more work. So if you do want to improve your soil quality, sample your garden soil every two to three years. If you get to know your soil, you can go to four years or more. But it is good to go in and do a soil sample every now and then you have it analyzed and for the major nutrients and the pH. And then go in and do those amendments. Growing cover crops is very helpful for improving soil. So we have plenty of information about growing cover crops. I'm not gonna address that here specifically, but I'm happy to talk with anyone about that. And then rotating vegetables helps both improve the soil quality and helps prevent some diseases. And when we say rotating vegetables, we mean rotating between the different plant families. So potatoes, peppers, eggplant and tomatoes are all from the same plant family. So you need to rotate to other plant families. Yeah, if anybody needs some more handouts, I came in, I have one. So when we give out home garden recommendation or commercial garden recommendations, the home garden recommendations are what I call dumb down. They're made excessively simple. And then the commercial recommendations are more specific. So sometimes home gardeners get the commercial recommendation and their eyes glaze over a little bit and they don't know quite what to do. That usually happens because they fill out their soil test, they fill out their sample, to get their sample for their soil test and they just accidentally filled out a commercial sheet. But what the commercial one will really focus on is going back and recommending a lot more subsequent applications of things like nitrogen. And a lot of times when we do that, it's called side dressing. You can also do it by liquid through an irrigation system. So side dressing is the big focus with the commercial recommendations. And some growers do that very religiously. Some probably don't do it as much. A nice in between for home gardeners if they want to try and go to the next level. In terms of growing their garden, but they don't want to follow the commercial recommendation is to go ahead and use a table that we have in one of our publications. And it's probably the easiest way is if you're interested in that publication, you could either Google the name or you could just send me an email. I do a lot of emails, but it's steps in fertilizing vegetable soils and we buy MU extension. And so it has a table in it that I show here, which tells people when to go back and do subsequent nitrogen fertilization at the growth stage of the vegetable so that you get maximum production. So the best example here is tomato. That if you're really trying to get the most out of that tomato plant, you should be going back three times and doing additional nitrogen fertilization. That would be one to two weeks before the first tomato ripens, two weeks after picking the first ripe tomato and then one month later. Now, when I talk to most gardeners, very few do that. And you'd say, well, why do you do it? Yeah, I get plenty of tomatoes as it is. But by providing that nitrogen to that tomato plant, the tomato is going to stay more green and vigorous with this foliage. And so it's gonna stay more productive through sometimes those hot dry spells like we get in August often. And it's also gonna be more disease resistant. A lot of times people don't realize that good foliar fertility is related to disease resistance as well. So it's worth it to do it if you really wanna try and keep those plants producing well. But a lot of people don't. They just get a bunch of tomatoes off it by the time they go into the end of July and August and just kinda let the plants fry up. Well, this says, this gives it in how much you want. You pounds of nitrogen per 100 feet of row. So you have to then know your nitrogen value of your fertilizer and back it off from that. Now, if you use synthetic nitrogen, it's fairly easy to do that conversion. And when you feed the plant with synthetic nitrogen, it's readily available. You can use organic farms of nitrogen and understand that they're just gonna be released a little bit slower. Well, in this case, they're using the rate they're recommending is ammonium nitrate. And it's, I think, 28% and they give the other ones. Ammonium nitrate is 33% nitrogen. And that's what they're using for this recommendation. So if you used a form of organic nitrogen that was real high, like blood meal or corn gluten, which are around 9%, you would wanna triple that amount that they feed. Sounds awful light to you. Yeah, well, high. Well, 100 feet of row of tomato plants to put on three pounds of blood mill. Yeah. Okay, so now we're gonna kinda jump into commercial. So that was kinda my quickie on the home garden stuff. So this is gonna get a little bit more detailed. So in general, when we do commercial fertilizer recommendations, they're based on a soil test. So we're asking people to get a soil test. The recommendations are adjusted for several different factors that are listed here. Organic matter being one, more organic matter you have that organic matter breaks down and releases nitrogen. So you need less nitrogen when you have higher organic matter soils. And so they just give an example here of how much organic matter is present in the soil and how it affects our recommendations later on down the line. So it has a big effect. We have soils with more than 3% organic matter and it follows a legume crop. They say you might not need to go back and do any supplemental nitrogen fertilization. If you start to have less organic matter and you aren't following a legume, then you're gonna need more. Legumes like soybean crops fix nitrogen and then some of it's released the next year. For transplanting, we're always gonna recommend, and a lot of vegetables are started by transplants, especially high value vegetables like tomatoes. We're always gonna recommend that you do a dilute amount of fertilizer at the time of transplanting. And one of the things that sometimes people don't realize the reason we're suggesting that is because if the soils are a little bit cold that phosphorus isn't always very available to the plant even if the phosphorus is in the soil. So all the transplant solutions usually have a high middle number because it's nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. So that middle number is always gonna be larger on transplant solutions. And this is whether they're an organic transplant solution or a synthetic one. We're gonna tend to say feed something high in phosphorus. Terms of pH, they vary across the spectrum of the vegetables. What range you wanna have for optimum pH but when you look at compared to other plants, vegetables are pretty narrow. They really want a fairly neutral to slightly acidic soil. So I show the sweet spot being 6.5. But when you compare it to something like Fescue which is happy with a pH as low as 4.7 or alfalfa down to 5.8 and up to 7.7, vegetables are less forgiving. So you really wanna get a good soil test and know your pH of your soil and then adjust accordingly. The only vegetable we have that we can say definitely maybe is better with a real low pH soil is potatoes. And that's because by having it low in pH you get less scab on potatoes. However, there are scab resistant varieties of potatoes you can grow so you can kind of counterbalance that. Potato production regions like in New York and such, they will run those soils low in pH but they're growing mostly potatoes. It's hard to grow a mixed group of vegetables in that same submit context. So I just was, this one is just to say, try not guess, do a soil test at some point. And Missouri has different soil regions and I realize there might be people from not just from Missouri here. But this shows our up to 12 different soil regions and I kind of did a little analysis on some soils from different regions one time and we're gonna use that as an example. And I managed to pull them from four different soil regions not necessarily that had that much impact but we do have different soil regions in Missouri. And the soil test lab will take that into account when they do their analysis. You always wanna, when you sample a field you wanna do it kind of in a random fashion. Generally you take a soil sample down to about six inches deep. And in terms of timing of soil sampling you wanna avoid sampling right after you maybe added some phosphorus or any lime or any manure. Best to wait about three months. You wanna sample every three to five years. And I usually tell people if you don't really wanna soil sample, be sure when you soil sample you'll do a really good job with that one because the worst thing to have is be questioning your actual sample later on and saying well was it a good one? So make sure to do a good one when you do it. And then you generally wanna sample the same time every year. A lot of times people will either choose the spring or the fall when they're still kind of at the end of the production season or before they get busy that's the most common two times. So October, November or February are the big months. And there's a bunch of different kinds of devices you can use to help make soil sampling easier. And a lot of times the extension centers will have these probes that you can get loaned out if you wanna borrow one. And we have like guide sheets that will specifically talk about how to read your soil sample and really understand that they can be confusing. Different companies do their reports in different way. So anyway, you're gonna get recommendations on your major nutrients as well as lime if your pH is low. And there's gonna be lots of extra notes on them. And with one soil sample, you can make, select several different vegetables that you might like to grow on that ground so that you don't have to do separate soil samples for each vegetable. You can do one good soil sample and get recommendations for several vegetables at once. So I wanted to just take a minute to kinda show the example of why it's very helpful to know what's in your soil so that you then can add the nutrients. So the example here is tomatoes and green beans and this shows from our most best publication we have for picking up recommendations of Midwest vegetable production guide for commercial growers. They give the range of what you want to add for phosphorus if you didn't know how much phosphorus is in the soil between zero and 250 pounds. Well, that's a huge window. So you don't wanna go guessing that big a range. And then the green beans is 0.75. So this is, if you're flying blind and you have no nothing, so let's go ahead and take a soil sample and then we'll see what the recommendations are. So then this shows what happens with how much we get recommended based on an actual soil sample. And all of a sudden, it's much more refined what we're told to add for different levels of nutrients. The kind of how the basics of how this works is we talk about something called the sufficiency level and they usually use these barrel that has these different stays and they're broken off at different places. Basically if a nutrient's limiting at a certain factor that's what limits the production. So even if other things are higher than that that one being low creates a situation where your yield is limited. And so you have to add that nutrient so that your soil is as productive as possible. Otherwise just one will limit your production. And so we like to try and see everything pulled up to what we call an optimum level and then we give a different value based on low, medium, and high on how much it'll help to add some of those different nutrients. Now there's another way of looking at this that sometimes people talk about called the basic cation saturation ratio. And I wasn't gonna talk about that unless somebody here is all enthused about the basic cation saturation ratio. Does anybody heard of that ratio before? Okay, do you want me to cover that one? No? Okay, so I'm gonna skip through a few because I added outside of your handout I added some slides that were a soil test we did nearby here and we looked at using organic compost to go ahead and supply the nutrients instead of synthetic fertilizer and I thought maybe people would be more interested in that. Okay, so I did the one year I took four different soil samples from different counties each one was in a different region. And sometimes people will say well I prefer this soil test lab and somebody else will say I prefer that soil test lab and you start getting into this discussion are some soil test labs better than others or something? So I said you know I had enough of this subject let's just go ahead and run a little study here. So we took four different farms four different soil samples we took them back to our soil test lab here in Columbia they dried them, they ground them they mixed them and mixed each one separately but they mixed it up they split it in half and then they analyzed theirs and then I sent the other half off to another rather well-known soil test lab called Midwest Labs I think they're an excellent soil test lab and this was just an example of a couple of fields one was right down in the bottoms by Jeff City so it was the river bottom and then another one was north of here. And when we looked at the actual analysis that we received from the different samples there wasn't a lot of variation so their actual testing was fairly similar in the results the recommendations varied some but there were a couple of notable examples. So one was that between MU and Midwest Labs they used a different way to analyze for how much organic matter was there and the Midwest Labs consistently said you had more organic matter there than the MU one and because that organic matter when it breaks down releases nitrogen their soil test recommendations are gonna follow suit and say you need less nitrogen so that was an important difference. Since we're normally lower on organic matter than we want to be I like to say if you wanna feel better about your soil you send it to Midwest Labs because that'll tell you you've got more and that was really probably the most significant there was some variation in pH and some other things but nothing that important. So then just kind of taking a look at tomatoes what was the difference in terms of the recommendation so each one of these counties is listed with the recommendation we got back from each of those soil test labs and how much nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus you would wanna add and the nitrogen recommendation was mostly because of the difference in the organic matter tests. One thing that was particularly interesting was MU was constantly telling you you needed more phosphorus added and I really have no explanation why Midwest Labs was saying you needed less supplemental phosphorus but they really said you needed less phosphorus than MU did and they also tended to say you needed more potassium so there was difference in the recommendations. Okay so we kind of took a look at a comparison on tomatoes and watermelons and I think another crop coming up here and again another thing that sometimes people don't realize when you do submit a soil test sometimes the soil test lab wants to know what you expect to get for a yield to then give you how much nutrients you need to add because if you grow a crop and it's extremely productive it's gonna pull more nutrients off that ground than if it's not as productive so MU kind of uses an assumed yield basis that's pretty low on watermelon yield eight tons per acre is not considered a high watermelon yield so that meant that they said you needed less nutrients in general because of that especially the nitrogen and the potassium and one of the explanations that came back to me about why there was some of those differences was because Midwest Labs uses as its basis for all its recommendations a lot of work it's done with corn in that Nebraska area and MU uses a lot of research that was done more on vegetables from Michigan and Minnesota so you notice nobody's basing their results on actual vegetable work done in Missouri and then we use sweet corn for another one and again one of the differences that also popped up was that sometimes on vegetables we'll say you can have a pH up to a certain level but if you go over just a little bit too high we'll tell you to bring that pH down and all of a sudden the way to bring pH down is add sulfur so in this case Midwest Labs I think their pH for the Calaway test came in at 7.8 and MU came in at 8.0 well that was just enough to pull the trigger so MU says you need to add 1300 pounds of sulfur so that's a case where the actual difference in the test result made a big difference on what they recommended but and then there was some influence MU normally doesn't give you recommendations on micronutrients and Midwest Labs does and they were saying to add some magnesium, zinc and boron and I kinda said well why is one soil test lab recommending for some of these things than others and the answer I got was that magnesium and iron compete in high pH soils and some of these soils were a little high in that sometimes you need an extra zinc and low pH soils so that was kind of the two differences and then for some reason Midwest Labs is really kinda into this thing where you need more boron sometimes so there were differences, you have a question? So the question is how long after you apply lime can you expect it to adjust that pH? Actually a lot of times for quite a while they'll say you're probably good for about four to five years the more you're trying to adjust something the more likely you are gonna have to test more frequently so if you're trying to pull a pH from like four, five to six, five you'd probably wanna come back and test that two years later but if you're just pulling it from six, zero to six, five you're probably good for four years. So we do, if people do wanna try and estimate their yield because it's required for a soil test report we do have the Midwest Vegetable Production Guide does give a table in their book to give you estimates so you don't have to try and just figure it out in your brain, you can look it up in a table and this Midwest Vegetable Production Guide for commercial growers is completely free on the web you can just Google that name it'll usually show up fairly well they also they are selling them over at the Morgan County seed area for a discount sale because they come out every year and the 2012 is coming to an end so they're selling them on sale for $5 so if you're interested in buying one you never get it at a better price unless we just give it to you next year. Okay so some things that come up with commercial growers is that sometimes you have smaller field plantings and you have a mixture of different crops so you take one soil sample for the whole thing and you say well I'm gonna plant five different vegetables so what do I do, how much fertilizer do I add you know it can get confusing so a couple of things here I kinda show a mix where I say okay let's take a look at tomatoes, melons, sweet corn and how much nitrogen are they recommending us to apply initially, how much phosphorus and potassium normally what we'll say is plant put on all your potassium and phosphorus pre-plant about a third of your nitrogen up to a half and then come back later and apply the additional nitrogen so here what I did was I just kind of averaged those together and then kinda did what I call a high average and that would allow you to basically apply this amount of potassium phosphorus and nitrogen on a field in one setting and not have to try and put this amount for that crop and this amount for that crop so it can get rather cumbersome when you might have several different crops on maybe a small acreage like just two or three. We really like to encourage people to look at using dry fertilizers, pre-plant as much as possible, if you try and put too much fertilizer on through a fertigation or irrigation system it's not considered as efficient for the plant to take that up especially in terms of potassium and phosphorus and it's also more expensive. It's more expensive to make those formulas up that then you can get water soluble and shoot through a drip system. It just costs more money so it's worth your time to try and put the stuff on pre-plant ahead of time. Manure is a great source of fertilizer and it just has time restrictions. Normally to keep things simple we'll tell people put your manure on in the fall to make sure that all those microbes break down and such through the winter. And if you can't put manure on in the fall but you wanna use some type of organic material and you're coming back in the spring that's when you wanna use compost because compost properly done has killed off all the bad microbes that cause concern for using too close to harvest for vegetables. Question. Well, we'll say the same thing which is all manure, we like to see it get tested so you know what the nutrients actually are. We do have some guidance on how much manure, how much fertility is typically available in the different manure sources. And those can help you out a fair amount. The concern I get is when people have a lot of bedding mixed in with manure because that can really skew that result. If you have a lot of bedding, sawdust or straw mixed in with the manure, it's not gonna be as nutrient rich as if it's more evenly just manure and a little bit of bedding. So if you're gonna be using a lot, it can be worth your time to go ahead and get it actually analyzed for your nutrients. And sometimes, you know, some places will actually provide that information for you, the manure source but my experience has been not very many people test manure. We'd like to see more people do it. Our soil test lab will run manure but I don't know if all soil test labs do. I think a lot of the bigger ones do. And it's not that, I think it's more expensive than a soil test because our standard soil test is $10. I think manure is like 20 or 30 bucks or something. So if you do wanna come in and do fertilization, one of the problems we get into with that is for smaller vegetable growers, they often have a hard time thinking of fertilization in acres because it's often like they have a smaller area, maybe they're fertilizing a quarter acre to a half acre or even less. And we do have a publication called Watering and Fertilizing Tunnels, Tomatoes in High Tunnels. And it breaks down some of that fertilization information very nice and simple. So if you are interested in doing that fertilization but you want it to kind of be easier way to understand that publication is good, whether it's in a tomato or in a small field planting, it's the same. And it'll help you figure out how much to mix up and fertilize with. So I wanted to cover, this isn't in your handout, but I thought of that today that I should add this because we did a little study here for a conference presentation. And it was from a vegetable farmer that's fairly close to here. And we looked at his three different fields. We pulled a soil sample from it. And then we looked at the recommendation or the first here it presented is the major nutrients and the pH and organic matter he had in his field. And then it says it's either high or very high or then medium or very low low in the different nutrients. So basically he had two fields that were really good, nice pH, nice organic, decent organic matter, really good organic matter in the middle one. And then one field that was pretty needed a lot of work. And then this shows the amount of nutrients that's recommended for him to apply because of what the crop he was gonna grow. So he doesn't need lime where his pH was already fairly high and then the one where it was low he needed quite a bit of lime. But this shows the value of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus and he did need calcium on that one field that was fairly poor but it would be supplied with the lime. And then showing again as an example for onions and then we have his spinach field. So what he wanted to do and what we really were trying to do for a presentation was to show, okay, he wants to use compost. How much compost does he need to supply to supply most of those nutrients? And so we had his compost tested and this shows the results from the compost test. It was a pretty nice compost. It's 2% nitrogen, little low on phosphorus and potassium but his calcium is 2%. So compost is a very valuable source of nutrients and you can feed a lot with that. So that was the easy part. The harder part was when I said, well, how much compost do you put on your field? And his statement was, well, I don't know. I think I put on about a quarter of an inch. I said, really? Okay, so how much compost is a quarter of an inch on an acre? Okay, so I had to try and figure this out. So my estimates of compost are that compost is a thousand pounds per cubic feet. That's how much it weighs. And a quarter inch is about 0.02 cubic feet per square foot times the square footage of an acre or 870 cubic feet. That's divided by 27 cubic feet per yard and or about 30 cubic yards is what he was putting on this field per acre. Which came out to about 30,000 pounds or 15 tons. So a quarter of an inch of compost on a field doesn't seem like a lot, but it ends up being a lot. That was very interesting. So how much does that come out in terms of nutrients that he's adding? And for potassium, for phosphorus, it was 128 pounds per acre. Potassium, 193 pounds. Pretty good dose of calcium, 577. And then nitrogens, where it really gets kinda complicated. The soil test says it's 2% nitrogen, a little over 2%. So that's 684 pounds of nitrogen. But not all that nitrogen is available that first year. And they have a conversion to tell you how much of that nitrogen is available that first year. And it's roughly about 15% of the total nitrogen. So he was feeding about 100 pounds of nitrogen with that addition of compost. So then let's take a look at, okay, so how much nutrients did he now need to apply once he's added that compost to his field? And there's your before and after. So basically the compost completely fed almost all his nutrient requirements for his first two fields. And only on his last field that he really had some work to do on it did he really even have to come back and look at doing some more adjustments. So you can feed all your nutrients on a vegetable garden, on a small farm, whatever, with compost, but it's really good to try and just not guess it all, try and figure it out. So, okay, I'm gonna run through some typical plant deficiencies because a lot of times what people will do is they'll plant their crops. And then when the plants actually start growing, they start to see some problems, and then they start to say, well, what am I short on? What can I do about it? How do I figure it out? So, plant nutrient deficiency symptoms get really tricky because they can be caused by soil pH, so some nutrients aren't available. They can be aggravated by different things. Cool weather, wet conditions, disease, because then the plants can't, if they got a root rot, can't take up those nutrients so that you see a nutrient deficiency, but it's actually a disease. Hot weather can do it. The crop sensitivity to develop symptoms varies between the different crops and even within a variety. And they also might be more likely to display in specific growth stages on a plant. So, it's good to kind of know what some of those deficiencies look like, but my example here is a heading type lettuce. When lettuce starts to head up real quickly in the spring, it starts to need a lot of calcium during that growth phase. And so, it's variety specific, and then when you get hot, humid weather, it starts to grow really fast. And so, a lot of times, it can't pull that calcium up fast enough and you get something called tip burn. And so, that's a nutrient deficiency, but it would be hard to just have that plenty of calcium in that soil to prevent it from happening. It's all these things coming together causing this problem. So, nitrogen deficiencies appears on the older leaves because nitrogen is very mobile within the plant. So, you see yellowing of the older leaves, and then you might get a stunting and slowing of growth. Sometimes, if the plant doesn't display it very strong, unless you have a plant next to it that's got plenty of nitrogen, you don't even really notice it. Phosphorus deficiency is also very fairly mobile, so it gets pulled out of the older leaves and it gets often displayed in a way that you can see it fairly easily. A lot of times, you'll get purplish leaves with phosphorus deficiency. And then, potassium is mobile again and it shows up in the older leaves. You sometimes get chlorotic spots and such. So, this kind of shows the deficiencies on a lettuce leaf. And so, the one on your left is just complete and then you see your nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and then all three short. So, you know, like on a lettuce leaf, it might be very hard to tell if you have phosphorus deficiency because the leaf is just smaller. And again, this one kind of shows the deficiency on beans and you kind of see some of those differences. Again, when the phosphorus, it's just the leaf is just a little bit smaller and just darker green. Calcium deficiencies often kind of result in weak stems on plants and you can also get some kind of yellowish showing up sometimes. But one of our classic ones for a vegetable plant that almost everybody grows and is probably seeing is blossom and rot of tomatoes. And it's especially likely to occur on hydroponic tomatoes because you have to liquid feed the hydroponic tomatoes. There isn't that reservoir of soil that the roots are in and they're able to pull that extra calcium up when they need out of the soil. So, terms of blossom and rot, it's usually worse early in the season. It's more aggravated by fluctuations of watering when it's in the soil. Often if you over fertilize with nitrogen and you get succulent growth, it's more likely to occur. Early season varieties are more likely to have the problem than later season varieties. And sometimes it actually just shows up on a first few tomatoes and then after that it kind of goes away. And the plant just as it's getting bigger and it's growing those roots deeper kind of gets over it. So, you can correct it with additions of some types of nitrogen. And they generally say you wanna avoid ammonium sources of nitrogen if you're having problems with blossom and rot. Magnesium deficiencies kind of show up as intravenous chlorosis on the lower leaves and generally at the tips and kind of moves inward. So, this shows a picture. I think that's a great plant. And then iron deficiencies is often associated with pH. As your pH gets too high, a lot of times you get iron deficiency because iron is less available at a higher pH than at a lower pH. So, we will see this a lot of times if a tree and especially pinnokes seem to be prone to it are kind of close to a gravel road. And so that dust off the gravel road keeps adding to the soil there and that will tend to raise the pH. And so a lot of times you'll see symptoms of the tips of the plant turning yellow as opposed to like in nitrogen where the tips stay green and the lower foliage turns yellow. Now, there's a lot of focus and interest on micronutrients and sometimes people get overly concerned about micronutrients when in general we say typically clay-based soils have micronutrients available to the plants that you really probably don't need to add them. If you're concerned, you can test for them and see if you need to add them. But we have a very significant opposite risk which is when people get too concerned about them and add too much. It's very easy to go into micronutrient toxicity on plants. And so I usually like to tell people really know your micronutrient level and don't just go in and try and add micronutrients because you think you need or heard you do. And this just shows some toxicity of the different micronutrients. And I have one example where people were very excited about boron when it first came out. The growers thought they were being influenced by lower yield because of lack of boron. And this is just an example in the boot hill where some growers went out and they mixed up some boron and they added it into their transplant solution and they just kind of over mixed it and they just killed a whole bunch of plants because they toxified them. And I saw another example a few years ago in a high tunnel where somebody got a recommendation of boron and it was okay if they would have spread it evenly over an entire floor of the high tunnel and then tilled it in. But what they did was they sprinkled it down the bed top right where they were planting the transplants. And when they first started sprinkling it they sprinkled a little too thick, you know how that goes. And so they had some boron toxicity. So if you do have a problem with a commercial field and you're saying, well, you know, I don't know what to do. I think most my nutrients should be there. What can I do to correct it? How do I find out? You do something called plant tissue sampling where you go in and you sample the leaves and then you submit them to a soil test lab. They analyze the leaves and then they can give you recommendations back on what you might be short of. So this works really good in two ways. One is to correct a problem you might be seeing coming. Another is if you start to monitor monthly. Some growers have a lot of money invested into a crop and they'll just every month or every couple of weeks they'll take those samples and submit them so they can keep a very close track of the plants. And normally what you sample is the most recently matured leaf and whenever you do this they'll have forms on the web that will give you instructions on how to do this right. But generally it's the most recently matured leaf so is the last one that's fully expanded. And, you know, they're gonna give you back recommendations and it's not an exact science. It's gonna give you a range and say, well you want to be within this range is good. And also as the plant grows, those ranges that you want to attain change. So there's three slides coming up here showing you how that changes in this example of tomatoes. So, and then kind of focusing on nitrogen is that the early stage is the sufficiency range is 3.5 to 3.5 to 5%. That's what they want to see the nitrogen percentage in a tomato leaf for an earlier young tomato. Once the tomato starts into the bloom phase then the sufficiency range drops to 2.5 to 4 and then once you've moved into the fruit then it's 2 to 3.5 and that's just for nitrogen. Each one of those ranges adjusted slightly as we move through that growth phase. So, you know, it takes practice. This is, but it can be very helpful especially for commercial growers. Okay, now we're gonna try and move on to some typical problems that people have because, you know, every season as you're aware from this one doesn't come with regular rainfall and, you know, optimum sun and that type of thing. This year, of course, we had the opposite problem that we had for like several years in a row which was really a lot of rain in the spring. So, I got sent this slide by somebody. I said, I need a slide of, you know, some crop that looks waterlogged and this one showed up in my email box and I said, what is that? So, anybody wanna guess what it is? Strawberries, was it your field? I thought it was red leaf lettuce when it showed up. So, anyway, but it's probably cold and wet early in the season and I think what happened is that the phosphorus is short and so the leaves turn kind of purplish and so that's why the leaves look so reddish in this picture but you can see that it's pretty waterlogged, right? So, anyway, so you get excessive rainfall, you know, how do you deal with it? What is the situation? So, first off, raised beds are really good because they do aid drainage in that zone and they protect the soil and this is talking about raised beds using black plastic as a film to help control weeds but we have had some growers that have said they've gone out and made raised beds fairly fresh and they have said it, it pounds down rain so hard, like five inches overnight that it literally smashes the raised beds down that they compact and so the question kind of became, well, what do you do then? And the answer that they kind of came back with was irrigate more frequently but when you irrigate use less water so you're kind of spooning out that water more carefully because you just lost a lot of capacity of that soil in terms of loose soil that will allow you to have oxygen in there and so if you don't have the oxygen in there if you put too much water, you smother the roots so you have to be much more careful in that instance in a situation like this on irrigation thereafter in the year and it's when do we get some of our really big rains like that is in the spring just after people have made raised beds and laid black plastic. Another situation is there's concern about when you get a bunch of standing water what happens to the nitrogen in that saturated soils? Nitrification is aerobic so the conversion of ammonium to nitrate nitrogen stops when you have standing water because it's no longer aerobic, it's anaerobic so that ammonium is just gonna kind of sit there. The leaching of nitrate nitrogen occurs on coarse-textured soils or sandy soils much more so than fine-textured soils so for a lot of the Missouri growers they don't get a lot of leaching of the nitrogen in these big rain events so that's kind of the good news and then the denitrification of nitrate nitrogen to gaseous nitrogen occurs on medium to fine-textured soils but it has specific needs for that to occur it needs to have a lack of nitrogen it needs to have that nitrate nitrogen to have converted if you're from ammonium if you used ammonium fertilizer and you need warm soil temperatures with organic matter or organic residue for this to happen so a lot of times when you have these big rains and you have standing water it's the nitrogen may not be lost is kind of the moral of the story but how do you correct the matter? If you do need to add more nitrogen how do you apply it if it's on a black plastic without watering more into the fertigation system how are you gonna get it there? So the real solution or answer to these type of events is sunny weather with no rain but it's good to just kind of know that that don't worry about maybe some of these other things they may not be occurring Okay so another issue that's come up in recent years with some growers and especially with tomatoes is something called yellow shoulder disorder where the tomato gets a yellowish all around the shoulder and they wanna know why and sometimes we can answer that and there is a this has been enough of a problem over a long enough period of time that there's some research done on it so it's kind of interesting because the causes of it 10 to 20% is genetics it might be the variety 30% is location, 5 to 10% weather, 40 to 50% unknown so first off even with all we know we may not be able to answer this situation but they have done with some research they said soils with organic matter less than 1.5% are more likely to develop the problem soils low in potassium increase the disorder foliar applied potassium does not help correct the problem and then other factors is the potassium in relation to calcium and magnesium and you wanna see the potassium and magnesium at a specific ratio often they use a value called cation exchange capacity to come up with that so they do have a website where you can plug your soil test numbers in and see if you're prone to this and for growers that haven't had this problem you probably don't need to be concerned I just bring this up as this does try into nutrients and a specific disorder some growers have struggled with so they have something called a hearts ratio that allows people to go ahead and look at their situation and they have a website where you can go and look at that and there's other discussions there so I decided to go ahead and take a couple of the soil tests that we used earlier and plug their numbers in and see where they ended up on this scale so the Morgan County samples on the left and the odd drain on the right and what you see here is they have that little kind of gray box and it says soils at low risk of yellow shoulder disorder in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states would have extractable calcium greater than 0.4 and the Morgan County sample it's lower than four they would have a hearts ratio at greater than 0.35 and theirs is lower than that and then they have the calcium would be greater than 4% as a percentage of their cation exchange capacity and their potassium is lower than that and then a calcium magnesium ratio they'd wanna have it greater than three they're lower than that and then they're available phosphorus there they are higher so that soil we would say would have a tendency to be more prone towards yellow shoulder disorder and they could try and do some amendments with potassium to try and adjust, change that or affect that and then the odd drain sample on the right basically tests as not having nearly as much problem as being a likelihood to have a problem with yellow shoulder disorder. Okay so that's it so kind of the conclusions that I like to say is test your soil make sure you sample it correctly add lime to get a pH of 6.5 on average if you use recommended pre-plant fertilizers to try and avoid making up your fertility later via fertigation it's just not as efficient or cost effective use the same test lab and be aware of the basis of their interpretations you know I'm big on consistency I would not wanna jump around from one test lab to another to another and then start comparing what happened from one year to the next seeing what I now know. Consider plant tissue testing if you get in a situation where you have a very high value crop and you really wanna keep close track of it these nutrient deficiencies can get very complex so the best thing really to do is really trying to get to know your soil and be working with that same ground year after year so I can take questions. Yeah that's what I'm told that when you get it analyzed it'll say total nitrogen 2.2% and then it releases about 15% of that. Now it releases 15% that first year and it's gonna keep releasing some of that nitrogen year in year out so if you keep applying compost one year after the next you're gonna need start to need less than less because that organic matter level is gonna keep building up. I think it releases more, more quickly and they have rates for that and like little calculators that'll tell you how much manure is released but when I think when I did some work with that I think manure was substantially better if I remember right like I think it was 60% the first year, 30% the second year, 10% the next year so it's kind of interesting because we're really all behind compost but in terms of straight nutrients it's more effective to put manure directly on the field than it is to make compost. Oh there's a lot of nitrogen is lost in the composting process too so if you look at how much total nitrogen you have with the manure before you start composting and how much you have after you compost actually less is there but there's all these other really beneficial things with compost and one of the nice things about compost is the ability to use it very when you want to because you don't have to be worried about the microbes and contamination of food. I'm not sure he was buying it in from somebody and he bought a lot in and of course he's like most growers he never tested it so we were working on this for a presentation together at a conference and so I paid for the soil testing that he did and the compost test and that was kind of our deal he would share the information if I would pay for all the testing so uh-huh there's some it depends upon it's chicken is it egg laying chickens? Okay yeah the concern with using so for let me back up for a second turkey litter is generally okay and the concern with chickens is using some arsenic in it that's the concern and I if I remember right the arsenic is especially associated with egg laying chickens so but chicken feed is very consistent and what you need to do is you need to find out what was what's in that chicken feed and then you can if you're certified organic you need to check out check with your certifying agency and say okay this is my source is this okay you know a lot of people are a little bit mystified they're like well isn't there organic manure and it's like well actually yes there is organic sources of manure but the problem is there aren't enough animals to go around to produce that manure to supply the manure for their organic growers so they kind of recognize that with the National Organic Program and said you do not need to have organic sources manure from organically raised animals to feed into the manure that would be your compost for your certified organic operations you can get in non sources of manure from non organic animals but that comes with certain restrictions and it's usually tied to something related to some type of disease or insect control so I would just check on that because I remember it being associated somewhat with the egg lane but it could be with the broilers too well I think it would it depends for what again if you're trying to be a certified organic grower there may be an issue but if you're just a grower and you wanna grow things more naturally with less chemical inputs I would just maybe try and find out what the active ingredient is I have a suspicion I might know or be able to with talking to a few people at the farm show here find out fairly quickly and a lot of times the thought is in the composting side of things a lot of times the breakdown of those chemicals is faster but not always there are cases now we have with herbicides where it isn't things, chemicals are not broken down so that's why it'd be good to know the active ingredient and then try and find out if that active ingredient is something that's fairly easily broken down in the barn are you composting manure or are you then just putting it, applying it directly? Okay yeah yeah I would just find out what that active ingredient is find out how persistent it is you know, there's a lot of variation with some of these chemicals now and some of them are compared to the old days are not as persistent and as well as they don't use them in the same they don't need to use as much of them to get the same activity on the insect like they used to so it's not like you're putting a lot of it on the animal I think there's probably too much variability it wouldn't be a bad idea because it would tie into the livestock side of things it would be interesting somebody would have to do quite a bit of testing on that so I guess to answer your question is no I don't think there's anybody working on that subject Lincoln University is actually doing quite a bit with some of these small ruminants goats and sheep and some raising them on pastures and kind of looking at how to integrate that with specifically blueberries on one farm but that's an interesting idea I hadn't heard of that one but it wouldn't be that complicated to do it would be more about testing looking at different supplies doing some testing to come out with stuff that maybe be a little bit easier like right now we have a guide sheet on organic gardening techniques organic vegetable gardening techniques and it has a very nice easy to use a little chart converting telling people how much cover crop seed to put down for like a hundred square feet it's like using some ounces so it makes it easier rather than trying to think of it in pounds per acre and then cutting back and it also has a chart that tells about the different organic amendments that and what they're high in and then how quickly they release their different uh... nutrients and that that again for me is a very easy chart to give to uh... home gardener so if people want to go in and supplement with nitrogen they have to understand that fish emulsion is good because it releases stuff really quick but blood meal or feather meals gonna release very slowly and in all that stuff kinda you know would be interesting in a research project would tell me that at lincoln over there