 Thank you all for participating in the end of the season webinars. I would like to say a big thank you to all our speakers who took the time and the commitment to prepare their presentations and to answer questions. I just want you to be aware that later in the fall, we'll probably have another workshop or so. We will be looking at how to use our pesticide guides, especially our orbicide guide, and also how to better use or variety trial information. Some of us are well-versed in using the pesticide guides and variety trials, but I realize that many of us are also new and do not have the experience of or maybe even the background in using some of those pesticides. So we'll have Joe Eichle and others will kind of discuss how best to use the pesticide guides and how best to understand and use the variety trials in form producers when they come asking you which varieties to use in specific areas. Today we have Dr. Franzin. He will be discussing soil fertility and fertilizer for 2023. Feel free to put questions in the question and answer session or in the chat box, and we will have lots of time at the end of this presentation to have follow-up questions and discussion. With that, we'll go ahead and you can start, Dave. Thank you. Thanks, Mohamed. So I found through the years that not only accounting agents, specialists, but certainly farmers and many crop consultants, the thing they know the least about is soils and fertilizers. So don't feel alone if some of this is kind of beyond your right at the beginning. So I'm going to try to make this as basic as possible to get you to start answering some basic farmer questions that you'll have to answer or that may come up this fall and this coming winter. So this is kind of an outline about what I'm going to be talking about. Soil testing. These are basic soil testing, where to find our crop nutrient recommendations, and then a little bit of detail on our nitrogen, phosphate, potassium and some other recommendations as we go along. So I want to start out with soil testing. So this is the basis of almost all of our fertilizer recommendations. So if a farmer comes to you and kind of wants to know what to do about fertilizer of the basic answer, I think I'd do what I did last year is usually not the best answer because things change from year to year. So to start out, soil testing is important and soil testing by zone, I think is the way to do things in the state. The depth of core is important. He's a zero to six inch depth core for surface nitrates, phosphate, potash, organic matter, surface salts, which is expressed as EC on a soil test, zinc and soil pH. The others, the tests are horrible or they're not important. The six to 24 inch depth is an additional depth and that's calibrated for nitrate in and then if they're growing barley, multi barley chloride might be important and you take it on that depth to the two foot depth and then some surface of salts and sometimes subsurface acidity, especially out west where that's a major problem. So start out with a depth and then the next step is how do you take the sample. The way I would prefer that people would take a sample in the state is to zone soil test. It's the dominant precision egg way to soil sample a field and even if site specific nutrient application is not possible. It reveals some odd areas in the field that may mask the availability of a nutrient. So this is just an example of the field where cores are taken throughout the field and if each core was analyzed individually it shows up there on the left. But those values usually have a spatial relationship either they're on some high ground where you can't grow crop and so the nutrient accumulates or it's on the low ground where nitrate might seep in and accumulate. But they tend to be localized into areas that are dominated by the landscape of the field. So I found early on in my North Dakota days started in 94. This is a 40 acre field with samples taken every quarter acre roughly and I got this nice little pattern in the middle they call the horse head pattern I think you can kind of see what I'm talking about there on the left and then when I sampled it in 95 I didn't expect to see the same pattern but I did and I saw the same pattern every year for 10 years when I worked at this field cities. These patterns are stable the values within the patterns are different but but that that supports the whole zone sampling and it's been confirmed by all kinds of crop consultants from one side of the state to the other. I did studies and over a 12 year period from Montana all the way all the way to the Minnesota River Valley so the the use of zones in this region is pretty solid. So again it's related to landscape. This is that 40 acre field I showed you before where the horse head pattern in the in the middle and here it shows up in blue roughly and it's surrounded by sandy to low mean ridges and it's this way along between the forms of horse head but it's all landscape related and it's because of the way the water moves. Eel differences can sometimes well oftentimes will follow the same patterns you can see the horse head in the middle there in the very dark green surrounded by the low low yielding sandy sandy low mean ridges. In some states, I always looked at zone sampling and they found it useful for their line and they found it useful for their for their potassium and less so for their phosphate and salt test for phosphate and I mean nitrate and in Iowa it's too warm to wet. But we can also use the same patterns for all of our non mobile nutrients like phosphate potash so pH, and that's because of the patterns of erosion in the field that also affect the availability of nutrients so the zones you make for nitrate are also very valid for all of the other nutrients as well. So the one sampling fits all. There's different tools and I have publications you can find on my website on the extension publications that go into these in detail. These are electrical conductivity the response of the salts and other things in the soil, the one on the left is a various rig there's several of these in the state, and he has two of them, one up at Langdon and one here on the station. And then the one on the bottom right is is an em 38 and it works on magnetism but if you remember your high school physics electricity and magnetism or are mathematically related so it gives you about the same kind of patterns. You can also use remote imaging for drones and from airplanes and from satellite images. The one on the right is a satellite image and the satellite images we have today are much much more fine tuned than these that you see here that are about 25 years old. So you can see those same patterns if you look real hard you can see the horse head and both of those pictures in this Valley City site. It's good to have more than one one tool to develop a zone map and I think most consultants understand this. But there are some that don't and so if they're thinking they can just use a aerial photograph and and they're off to the races that that may or may not be true. It will be if it's lucky, but this is about a 40 acre field up by beach in the western part of the state with the satellite image up and up on the top, the topography and the lower left and then the EC, the salt reading and the in the right and you combine these three have a pretty good idea what that field looks like and where you need to sample each one of those separately. You only get a little bit of a view of what you really need to do. So that's that sampling in a in a very readers digest version so where do you find our fertilizer recommendations. They've all been redone in the past decade or so so you know if you have an old file that has 2025 year old recommendations pitch them because they're not valid. They're not right. And the ones we have are modern, they use modern data, and they have new use modern modern concepts are very scientifically supported. So you can either search for day friends and DSU select my homepage, and then select my extension publications and put that link in your favorites but you can also do. So fertility and DSU communications and you should come up with that website there on the bottom. And I think you're going to get this presentation at the end that you can have. And so you'll have, you'll have those that you can that you can use all the recommendations are there and most of them are up to date, although they're continually being adjusted. So I want to get down to the specifics of the major nutrients nitrogen phosphorus and potassium are the three most common, commonly applied fertilizer nutrients either organically or commercially in the in the state. So misconception though is that all the nitrogen for crops comes from fertilizer and that's not correct anywhere from anywhere from 25 to at most 60% of the of the fertilizer nitrogen that the plant takes up comes from the fertilizer the plant isn't lost usually sometimes it can real wet season, but most of the time it's just tied up in different things and we get a lot of nitrogen from our release from the soil, and this comes from process we call mineralization, which is decomposition of residues and soil organic fertilizer. We also have release of non exchangeable ammonia from smectite clays which are clays that are found across the state and they're more common in the East and they are on the West by far there. And then also in a long term no till no till systems we we have a credit or it doesn't take as much nitrogen to produce a crop in long term no till as it doesn't. So conventional till and part of this at least comes from the work of a symbiotic nitrogen fixing organisms usually bacteria but not all all the time that are supported by by long term no till the limitation that they're to their success is food and housing and there's very more of each in long term no till and there isn't conventional till. So, that's part of the of the no till nitrogen credit. Part of the nitrogen and our formulas for for fertilizer for the next year is from previous crop nitrogen credits. There's a couple of credits that come directly from decomposition of a plant residues from the previous year, but most of the annual legumes do not we, we have a credit for sugar beet leaves for those of you that might be in the east. If you have green and yellow green leaves at harvest time. These leaves are are pretty rich in nitrogen and rot really fast and contribute nitrogen directly to the next crop. You also get this kind of a credit from alfalfa if you happen to terminate an alfalfa crop. There's some nitrogen from that crop that's available for the next several years, just from directly nitrogen release from the crop residues but the nitrogen from the previous crop credit for soybeans for field peas lentils dry beans all of those annual residues, but it's not from that at all. Those crops don't have much residue to tie up the natural nitrogen release in the soil. As you get the tie up from say corn residues or canola residues or wheat residues certainly any small grain residues they tie up nitrogen, and you don't get that with annual legumes and so more more the nitrogen that's mineralized and compressed in the next year, and then also something we know in soybeans and probable also with the other annual legume crops is that those annual legume crops have some kind of evolutionary mechanism that they developed over time as they stimulate the organisms that decompose tissues and release nitrogen that mineralization and they increase the rate of mineralization so they don't have to work so hard to feed the nodules on their roots so that that's where the nitrogen credit for manual annual legumes comes from doesn't come from the decomposition of the crops so really yield to those of those previous crops is not important it's just the fact that you're growing the crops is important. And it's, I think as I recall it's about 40 pounds as a previous crop credit for annual legumes. Modern nitrogen recommendations everything that you'll find, and you know, nitrogen recommendations in North Dakota is is based to maximize farmer profits and not necessarily yield if you put on more nitrogen you put on more fertilizer. Maybe you'll get another bushel or two or maybe additional time but it'll cost more to produce it than it will to cost more for the fertilizer and then it will for the grain or the, or the commodity that you get back so so why why in the world you do it you're putting on fertilizer make money and if you don't make money why in the world you doing it. So, all of these recommendation changes have been have been made with with recent field studies all over the state in most cases. So, if you go to my website on the right hand side there's a, there's a link for nitrogen calculator for corn and spring wheat Durham and for sunflowers and if and it's all in one the old one had separate ones for each one but my, my wonderful technician God on gang that develops all these programs with them all in the one and there'll be an app coming out and Android and iPhones in the future this winter sometime that's not available yet so only this one on that you can get through the web is available right now so this is the one for corn has a state divided up in the four regions east and Langdon central west. The corn is the only one that divides out the central region and that's just because of the yield limitations of that central region compared to what's in the, in the east. Not as much water. There's more salts there's all kinds of limitations to maximum corn yields you can get 250 wish of corn in many parts of the eastern eastern region but you'd have to struggle to get 200 in the central so anyway that's why that's carved out the Langdon region is carved out on all of our recommendations because the shale that you find in that short soil has ancient non exchangeable ammonia that's released every year and it acts like a slow release fertilizer so the recommendations are lower in that region. And in the western region it's just drier it's warmer and those of you that live out there understand all that and so there's limitations and also it's all almost all no till like 98% is no till one past seating. And so it's carved out as a different region and the response curve is different out there. So what what what you do. See, my thing doesn't work. Anyway, though, you, you choose the closest corn price you choose the closest nitrogen cost percent organic matter in the soil really isn't important until you hit 6% and then it is. You do have soils that have over 6% organic matter in the in the soil and when you hit that you don't need as much nitrogen. You put in your two foot soil nitrate test as we described before in the beginning slides. You put in the previous crops that you planted and whether it's irrigated or non irrigated is important also you click on the region that you're in and then you calculate. So that's the corn one. The wheat one pretty similar wheat price nitrogen cost organic matter two foot nitrate previous crops. You click on the zone you're in and then you also put in the tillage type in the bottom and when you when you calculate that's how you that's how you work it. And then the sunflower same thing sunflower nitrogen organic matter two foot soil test previous crop region tillage. And then the sunflower type is important to the oil seed. The nitrogen recommendation is a little bit lower because the higher the end you apply the lower the oil that you get. Farmers get paid a premium on oil and they get docked if it's below I think what 40% I think something like that. And then in the confection, you don't have that kind of problem but the rates are limited because the higher the nitrogen that you apply the greater risk you have for lodging toward the end of the season after the head develops and that's a huge deal. All right, so you'll find that you'll doesn't have any kind of a part in nitrogen recommendations and they have any part in any of our recommendations, because the fertilizer rate is based on relative yield, whatever the environment and soil will give you for a given year. There just needs to be enough nutrient available so that doesn't restrict yield and so the recommendations take that into account. So, let me give you an idea about what why relative yield is important so this is our data set from all of our sunflower work that we did between 2014 and 15. And it just looks like a kind of a scatter diagram you can kind of force of quadratic curve into it. So we have a quadratic curve on a fertility study but an R square to 0.2 is pretty horrible. And so what are we doing because each of those sites at a real strong relationship to nitrogen. So this is on a kind of a simpler scale this is kind of what we're looking at so here's that cloud that you can kind of force a quadratic curve on. So these are these almost parallel quadratic curves from a low yielding environment up to a higher yielding environment so that's what we're seeing and you've seen that, seeing that graph of that really low R squared in the sunflowers. And so what we do is we standardize the data. For example, we have a sunflower site that they yielded 4,000 pound and the highest highest yield treatment. So we divide all the yields by 4,000 to reach values between zero and one. Now we have a low yielding site maybe out amadon someplace with 1800 pounds we divide all the yields in that trial by 1800 so we have values between zero and one and we do that with all of the sites so that we get each one standardized between zero and one. And then what we end up looks like that it all collapses against across a quadratic curve. And the R squared is a lot higher so I'll give you a couple examples just to make sure that you know you don't think I'm just making this up. On the right hand side, this is Western North Dakota conventional till wheat sites all of them raw yields in the R squared at point one six. But that same data we standardize it and put it on the standardized yield within the site and total known available and and the R squared more than triples up to point five three. So that's what that's what's happening that's it's related to relative yield and not actually yield. So the Eastern North Dakota no till sites raw yields on the left are squared point two and the standardized same data just standardized are squared jumped up more than three times to point six eight so it's all relative yield. It's not actually yield so you'll go really is an important. This is my favorite one of all time we haven't published this one yet but pretty soon. This is the barley to grow barley trial that we've done for a couple years and if we took the actual yield over on the left. The R squared is abysmal point zero zero five nine so our recommendation would be, you don't need nitrogen for barley which is totally not true. So we standardize each of that data. We have our squared is like point five five. So it's really really really really related to nitrogen is just relative yield not actually yield. So it's almost magic but it's not magic it's just good stats. Alright so why in the world does this happen and people maybe come in and sit down and they'll say well you know my goal for wheat is 50 bushels and you'll say I don't care. And they'll look at you kind of funny and or more than funny and before they walk out. Well in a low yield of environment that nitrogen use efficiency is way less and there's less nitrogen mineralization smaller root ball. And if it's excessively wet you have a lot of nitrogen loss and so the result of all of that either dry or too wet, making a low yielding environment is that it takes far more. It's more nutrient per bushel ton or pound than it does in a normal year. And then once in a while we get a really ideal environment 2016 was as close to that as I can remember. And the moisture is near ideal so the nitrogen use efficiency was really really high the roots were able to grow to the furthest genetic potential and nitrogen was moving to the roots by mass flow. Microorganisms were working overtime mineralization and release to the crop and so it took far far less nitrogen and other nutrients to supply the crop per pound per bushel per ton and it wouldn't a normal year and so the net result is a rate that produced the highest economic maximum yields in a poor year is the same rate that's necessary in a really good year so you go doesn't have any effect. All right, so that's nitrogen and kind of the same kind of philosophy we use on the other nutrients as well. You won't see your goals anywhere. All right, so phosphate requirements we have two crops that we found that the phosphate application is not important. And those are flax and sunflowers maybe it's because the mycorrhiza the fungus that was symbolically with many, many of our crop plants is particularly efficient in those two crops I don't know. But for whatever reason, our studies show mine and others show that phosphates not needed for those two crops. If you apply them it's a complete what money down to drain that year, I guess. So, and then phosphate starter and by starter I mean anything that that's banded pay placed in concentration, either with the seed or close to the seed are very important for all of our small grains for sugar beet for potato for canola and for corn, but that's all. And we don't put starter fertilizer with soybeans, because it almost always reduces yield and never increases yield so that's a broadcast, the one crop that's not here that probably should be here is dry animal beans. If the soil is moist to planning time a small amount of starter fertilizer and sub time helpful, but we also know that if you go into a season like last year, not this past spring but last spring when it was so incredibly dry. Leave the leave the starter fertilizer off the dry beans because it probably is going to reduce the stand and maybe you but if the soil is moist, it'll improve the dry beans a little bit. But it's not nearly as important as those crops I show up there in the middle small grains to corn. So that's phosphate. That's a quick one. Alright, so potassium requirements are based on clay chemistry and I'm going to a little bit more detail on this because this is pretty unique Minnesota and South Dakota are also working on recommendations based on clay chemistry and others are looking at it to but we're the only state so far that bases are OK recommendations on clay chemistry which is unfortunate so plays aren't just small particles are defined as NRCS is being particles less than point zero zero two millimeters in diameter. But there are some what's called amorphous particles within that within that fraction of the soil. Which means that they are they're not crystalline but but they're a lot of a lot of objects a lot of particles within that clay fraction that are actually the clay crystals the clay minerals. And they're formed in sheets of oxidized aluminum and silicon when the magma the lava cools and their origin is metamorphic rock and they continue to this day. So just a little bit of basic chemistry of the clays. The black dots in the middle of those structures are the silicon and then the blue that surrounds them is the oxygen and the black lines are the bonds they're the bonds and so it it forms these sheets of silicon oxide sheet and the silicon. Si oh four on the bottom that's the building block but they locked together like that into the sheets. And they don't exist independently they exist in combination with aluminum hydroxide building blocks and aluminum hydroxide sheets so there's sheets of silicon bounded sheets of aluminum. And sometimes there's two sheets of silicon on either side of the aluminum like a sandwich. This is this is a one to one clay Kala night we have a lot of Kala night West River. And that's what this looks like. It's a the silicon sheets aluminum hydroxide sheets semi bounded together really pretty tightly there's nothing that can go in between that and then there's stacks of these on top of each other, and they don't. They're bound pretty tightly and nothing can get in between them and then there's two to one place, and they look like this instead of instead of a sheet of aluminum hydroxide and one of silicon oxide and then one on top of the other they look more like a sandwich and then these sandwiches are piled on top of each other. But there's space in between them depending on what the what the ion is that binds them in between. So, after all that mess. I think maybe looking at them and maybe a little bit more instructive so the, this micro graph on the, on the right shows a shows a clay Kala night clay sample and in the middle you can see these stacks of. Oh gosh what they look like almost like books. You can actually see the silicon oxide sheets stack one on top of each other look how tightly they're bound. They, they moved each other these things don't shrink and swell. They. Thank goodness they don't. They don't there's just not Kala night in the soils in the West. There's also some light there's also some smack tight in there to that allows a little bit of mobility. The slide number rest is from illyte and you can see the clay layers, especially on that on that those plays on the on the left. And then there's an image indentation in between. And, and so those stacks of smack, a smack tight sheet is, I mean illyte sheet illyte sheet illyte sheet. And then the indentation is the potassium ions and flowed out in between there, but not very much. You get potassium flowing out of the edges you get a little bit of curling in the edges but not much in the middle so they're kind of semi forgiving but not really forgiving. There's a lot of space in between the two to one place sheets and that produces this wavy type of pattern with a lot of space in between the cat ions and water can flow in and out. And that's why they shrink and swell they shrink when they're dry, and they expand when they're wet, and they expand when they freeze and they shrink when they thought and so they're like accordions little accordions in there. And the soils in the very east that are very highly spectatic, maybe 80% of the clay fraction is smack tights those are self healing soils anybody that's doing deep tillage in the east is total recreational tillage because the soils till themselves. There's no, no need for any of that. All right, so why is this important in potassium when when those those spectide shrink they trap the potassium inside the clays. And I think it draws the potassium inside the clays also. And so you have a soil test that you think is going to be okay. And then you get a really dry summer and then you have potassium deficiency symptoms as you see in corn is particularly sensitive to it. The potassium deficiency symptom is yellowing and necrosis on the bottom leaves on the edges of the leaves in the midrib is the last thing to turn yellow. But you don't see this when it's moist, but you see it when it's dry. And that's why another source of potassium especially in the very eastern part of the state of potassium filled spars which are another metamorphic type of mineral. And within those spaces and those are kind of like what rectangular tubes, full of full of potassium. And so they release potassium over time to people used to think that minerals in the soil didn't really release potassium very quickly but we know that they do. So they're, they're certainly a source of potassium in areas that do. So potassium nutrition is very, very, very, very different than probably what you learned in your soil fertility class of the even cover cover that at all. It's usually the last thing in the soil fertility course and they spend about 10 minutes on it they should start out with potassium, because it's as complex in terms of physical chemistry is what nitrogen is biologically. So there's all kinds of sources of potassium and all kinds of ways the potassium get tied up or lost. And this is a new paradigm of potassium in the soil. So our recommendations are based on smectite to light ratio if you have less than three and a half as you see on the graph and on the top. You have 150 per per million or soil test you're in good shape. If you have less than that you need to add some smectite to light ratio is greater than three and a half with greater smectites in your soil than the soil test needs to go up to 200 ppm as a critical value. And that's all in our recommendations. In the southeast part of the state we have quite a bit of potassium filled spar and so that helps keep and maintain or soil test the way they are but once you get West River we don't have much at all. And so it all has to come from what you see in the soil test. So this is a map in all of our recommendations and this is the less than three and a half or white and greater than three and a half or the dark color and that generally let's a farmer know where where they stand and what what what their goal is by the light ratio or is it's it's very expensive to figure out I mean a farmer can but there are limited labs that do this work. We send our lab our samples to a lab in Ontario and if you're interested and then give you the information but it costs over $400 a sample to have it run and you have to get it through systems, which is a little bit of a stretch sometimes. So, but anyway, it is possible for a person to do that on by their own is just really expensive. We have a calculator app that's also depends on the price of the corn and the cost of the potassium fertilizer. The North Dakota calculator app on an iPhone or or Android you can find this and you can put in the values and and figure out what your, what your rate should be on corn. The next thing I want to talk about is his is pH and liming it's something pretty form to North Dakota but something becoming way way important, especially West River but not only West River but we have some pretty acid soils and places. So, we have to intensive crop growth and application of any ammonia based fertilizer and this includes a manure it results in the future as as soil of certification long term you see it first long term no till you see it first because you're not mixing it with soil from down below, but people in conventional till see this pretty soon. But what the no till soils of the canary in the coal mine. And so we're starting to see that we have to do this remedy is liming, which is the application of any amendment that reacts with hydrogen ions to form CO2 and water and conventional till systems material is incorporated and no till it's not just laid on surface so we don't have a single limestone quarry in North Dakota which is really unfortunate in Illinois where I came from their limestone was the bedrock that under lane almost all the state. And here we don't have that so our source sources or water treatment lime sludge and sugar beet waste line, and which is their good liming sources and they're free. The trucking is expensive and all of our sugar beet lime sources around the edges of the state and nothing in the middle. You pile it up in the field and then use an unloader to put it in a spinner spreader can't go through pneumatic that'd be death and then it's spread on the field. So our limited research and Chris Augustine and Ryan veto in particular been working on this out of Dickinson because that's where the major problem is is I'll conclude that surface liming alleviates the low pH stratification that we see and aluminum toxicity which we get when the soil pH gets below five. So legumes are particularly sensitive to this but all crops are to some degree unless you're growing blueberries and they like it. So this is what you'd like to see with legume on the pH above five and the nodules in the top few inches of soil. We have a surface pH of four and a half or so on the pH below there may be five the soybeans and any kind of legume struggles to nodulate the environment like that. If we apply line to the surface of we can get that pH up around six or so and we start to see the nodules again and everything is happy. North Dakota is not the first state to see this southern Illinois was almost abandoned in the late 1880s because of a certification problem. In a researcher from Illinois found that if they if they line these soils they could put them back in productivity and we wrote this this cool circular that's called wheat from stones and there's the cover page on it right there showing the acre wheat without without the limestone and the the wheat that you can grow if you put limestone on so it so it made a huge impact on on that. This is the first state and all the others. So this is Chris Augustine's work at my not in 2020 in the foreground you see the pathetic wheat crop in the foreground where the pH is in the four in the high force aluminum toxicity and really low pH problems and in the background is where it was limed and this was incorporated a few inches but that was the政治 beat line that was applied and yields are hugely better. So this is, this is what, what it costs at that time in 2020 about $50 a ton hold from Sydney at the sugar beet plant with zero tons of an acre that pH was 4.5 with aluminum of 51, which is pretty horrible. And then with four tonne an acre, the pH increased to 5.9 and the aluminum was greatly reduced. So that's what increased the yield in those trials. So these are steps. Should sample is zero to three inches, three to six. Have the lab run pH and buffer pH on both depths. Line up your lime source, schedule the application. It's best to do it in the fall to avoid compaction and apply before freezing. So I think lastly, lastly, I want to talk about sulfur because that's something that's changed greatly in the past 20 years. We used to get sulfur from the air in the left-hand side. You can see in the North Dakota area, you can see all the plumes from the, just across the border from Crosby in Canada where they had the power plant in Canada. And then you can see the power plants along the Missouri River. And you can even see some of the beet plants along the Red River on the Western edge of, well along the border, you know what the beet plants are. And if you look at 2019, you can still see some of that. I don't have the 2022 slide up there, but at that point they pretty much disappear. So essentially we don't get any sulfur from the air anymore from almost anywhere. And so that means that that's a source we used to get and now we don't. The soil test is garbage, don't even use it. People use it because people ask for it. The labs run it because people ask for it, not because it's worth anything. So don't ask for it because it's not worth anything. You're gonna get sulfur responses in certain crops. If you have a wet fall, if you have a wet winter, what's early spring, especially on sandy loam and coarser soils, anywhere that's been leaching. And we have a lot of those in the state. And if we have persistent rain in the springtime, you can even see it in soils that have four or five percent of organic matter and clay content to 40%. So it's all a factor of the rainfall. Elemental sulfur is not an option. Use sulfate sources. Don't put ammonium sulfate liquid with the seed. It's like liquid death to the seed. And then consider sulfur for these crops. Absolutely for canola, no question. Absolutely for canola. But it's also important for small grains, any small grains in the corn. Any of the broadleaf crops, it's not nearly as important. You don't see the degree of deficiency and you don't see the consistency of any kind of return on it. But for the small grains, canola and corn, pretty important. So here's my contact information before we go to questions. And I think most of you know how to contact me. And you should feel free to contact me. And some people kind of apologize when they call and say, well, I'd like to ask a stupid question. And I said, well, if you're gonna ask it, it's not stupid. It's only stupid if you don't ask it. So I wasn't born with this information. Somebody taught me. And so it's my job to teach you. And so I wanna make sure that things are understandable and that I'm accessible. And all of us specialists feel that way. We hear sometimes that people are reluctant to talk to us because I don't know, we're in some kind of astral plane. And that's not true. We're just, we're good at what we do, but we enjoy teaching. And that's why we're doing what we're doing. So we'll open up for questions and thanks for being here. Okay, so on the Q and A Lisa, Lisa's asking what grasses and pastures benefit from potassium fertilization. I can hear Kevin saying, don't fertilize native range but curiosity killed the cat. So I think that the studies that we've done years ago with say phosphate, nitrogen, all of those, it's really hard to get your money back. The only forage crop that really benefits hugely from potassium fertilization is alfalfa, but certainly our native ranges, all of those, I don't think they would. We have some pretty high native potassium values in most of our soils, especially in the West. Don't pay any credence to any recommendation. You say that there are percentages of base saturation. Those are horrible recommendations. Don't pay any attention to that. But alfalfa, especially right before you seed it, putting on a pretty good amount of potassium is a good thing, but no, I wouldn't generally just do it. And then Julianne asks, what's ATS? Don't put ATS with the seed. So ATS is ammonium pylosulfate. It's 11-0-0-27-S. It's a liquid, smells like sulfur. And a lot of people put it through their irrigation pivots because you can mix it with 28%. Some people stream it. So if you go in winter wheat or if you're gonna stream supplemental material on your small grain, you can mix a little bit and with the UAN, the 28% to 28-0-0, the ammonium nitrate, urea solution, all of those are the same. But yeah, ammonium pylosulfate is a liquid fertilizer and it's a good sulfur source. But if you're putting a liquid starter on, ATS is not something that you wanna put on. It's really, really tough germinating seedlings. You can kill them pretty quick by doing that. So don't do that. Sulfur doesn't volatilize, which is one of the nice things about it. And so you can put it on top and you don't have a risk of loss like you would if you put urea on top without a urea's inhibitor. So that's all I got for Q&A right now. I know what's going on in the chat. All right, so yeah, this is a million-dollar question. Muhammad has a question for you. When you had the time, should growers buy or fertilize now and wait? Any possibility fertilizer price going down? Your thoughts on availability in the spring. So yeah, fertilizer has been a roller coaster for the past year or so and it continues to do that. Right now the prices are quote unquote lower than they were, but they're actually higher than they were last time this year. I would consider the agronomy and the practicality of the fertilization without any regard to what I think is gonna happen in six months. I certainly don't know what's happening in six months. Anything can happen in six months. And right now we got the hurricane down in Florida that's gonna disrupt phosphate supplies. Also a lot of the ammonia that comes in from Trinidad and Tobago, which are big Caribbean ammonia suppliers, they come into the Port of Tampa. That's not gonna happen for a while. So there's all kinds of stuff that's going on that's gonna influence the price. So the Russia-Ukraine thing continues to be an issue. The European ammonia manufacturers have started to shut down because it can't get natural gas. And so they're gonna have to get ammonia from someplace else or urea, whatever they're using. It's kind of a mess right now. So if you're a farmer that has 40,000 acres and 20,000 of them need to be fertilized with nitrogen, the practicality of just putting some on this fall so that you don't have quite that burden in the spring is probably a smart thing. But I wouldn't hold off based on thinking that's gonna go down next spring. There's too many things going on that tell me that that's probably not gonna happen. I'm just glad I'm not in the fertilizer even this anymore. In the past, you've been able to kind of book and then not really pay for it until spring. That's not gonna happen either because the fertilizer companies are gonna have to book and pay. And so they're gonna have to require the farmers to book and pay. And so anything that you book this fall have to be paid for this fall. And I don't think you're gonna be able to transfer, okay, I bought ammonia. Can I trade that in for the same dollar or urea? Absolutely not. It's not gonna happen. I would be shocked if anybody gave that option to a farmer. I certainly wouldn't do it as a fertilizer dealer, not unless I wanted to go bankrupt next year. I didn't put a slide up about how to figure out what the cost of, say, nitrogen is. Let's say that the cost of ammonia is $1,600 and 1,640 a ton. Let's just say it's 1,640 a ton. What does that mean in terms of cost per pound of nitrogen? So what you do is you figure out how many pounds of nitrogen are in a ton of a product in ammonia. It's 8,200. The guaranteed analysis of any fertilizer is a three number thing. And then if it has sulfur on it, like the ammonium pylosulfate does, it'll tack it on on the end with a parentheses that has that nutrient on it. So I told Julianne before she had to leave for another meeting that it was 11,0027 S. So the 11 is 11% nitrogen. The zero is 0% P2O5. The third zero is 0% K2O. It's always that way, NPK, the number, number, number NPK. And then the fourth one had the S in parentheses. So that's 27% sulfur. So if we have 8,200, which is the guaranteed analysis of ammonia, then that's 82% nitrogen in ammonia. So a ton of ammonia is 2000 pounds times 0.82 is 1640. So there's a reason I chose $1,640 a ton for ammonia, because if you take 1640 and divide that into 1640, you get one, right? So if you have $1,640 a ton of ammonia, that means you have a dollar a pound nitrogen. Right now it's a little bit less than that, probably 90 cents, probably around $1,400 a ton, something like that, but you figure it the same way. 1640 into 14, whatever the price is and you get it. Urea, it's 4600. And so with a ton of ammonia, there's 920 pounds of nitrogen in a ton of urea. So if urea is, I don't know, if urea was $920 a ton just to be simple in my head, that's a dollar a pound. Right now it's probably more like 800, something like that, which is around 80 cents, I think. But that's how you figure it and that's how you figure all of it. Coming up January 18th, you can put it on your calendar is the annual soil and soil wanna workshop at the Fargo Dome. It's the day after the wide world of weeds that Joe Eichle puts on and the rest of the weed department. They have theirs the day before on Tuesday and I have mine on Wednesday. So that's January 18th and then there'll be other opportunities for other presentations across the state this winter for sure. I haven't had a lot of requests yet, but I'm sure that'll all change.