 And so that Ruth has signed me this title of sampling, tests, and interpreting results. And I don't know how we can get this in one hour lesson. So the first part, oh, the heck, okay, is the soil sampling. And in Nebraska, we've always, the University of Nebraska always used eight inches as that sample. South Dakota State, when I was at South Dakota State in the 60s, we advised taking a zero to six inch sample because you call that the plow layer. Well, in Nebraska, they don't have rocks in their soil, so they could plow deeper, I guess. That's why the University of Nebraska said zero to eight. But I like to use zero to eight. And so you can use either zero to six or zero to eight, but you should do the same depth each year on whenever you take the samples. Remember that depth. And I have reading the farm magazines on no-tail farming and some soil health things now. Some of the guys are advocating a zero to four inch sample. Well, if you've paid any attention, you know that the residue is decomposing on the surface. And if you put fertilizer in the soil, the plants take up the residues on top, or you put the fertilizer on top, plants take it up and put it on top. And so the natural process is for the fertility to be the highest in the top two inches of the soil. And as you go down, it gets a little less. And so that soil depth is very important for being able to use some guideline to interpret your soil test. If you're using South Dakota State guideline or whatever one that is, if you've got a shallow soil, you're going to have high tests. And you might miss out on some yield because you didn't put enough fertilizer on. If you go deeper, then you get less fertility. And now you can have the other opposite spend more money on fertilizer and you really need to because you took didn't take their proper sampling depth. So, so zero to six or zero to eight, always, always do that same, same depth. Now, and if you don't have a soil probe, you can gouge out a hole and take a thin slice with a tile spade like that. And then you have to have a clean plastic bucket. There's the auger. Oh, I got, I got this one in there too. And again, for the irrigators in Nebraska, I have to go 36 inches deep. So, but, but in South Dakota, most of the guys go six to 24 inches. Or if you're going zero to eight, then eight to 24 inches to get residual nitrate, carryable nitrate in that subsoil and see what your sulfur test is. And we got lots of areas in South Dakota that sulfur in the surface, eight, six inches of soil, maybe pretty low, but the subsoil down to 24 inches could have gobs of sulfur in it in a lot of places. And then you'll find those parts of the field that sulfur has gone out of that, out of that subsoil also. So it's really important to do a zero to six and six to 24 inch sample. Now, the next part is how do you do that? And I say a clean plastic bucket. When I was at South Dakota State, we started running zinc tests and I had some really high zinc. And I wrote to the back in those days, you wrote comments on reports and said, here's the proper way to take zinc. You don't put the samples in a galvanized bucket. And then the gentleman wrote back and said, well, that's the problem. I took these soil samples in galvanized buckets and let them set two weeks before I sent them in. And enough galvanized zinc is galvanized metal. And so that contaminates. So clean plastic bucket. I said clean because a co-op down in Bird City, Kansas, one time setting samples. And he said, those results can't be right. And I asked him some questions. And he said, yeah, use a plastic bucket. Was it clean? He said, well, I'll go ask the guy. And he called back and said, well, the guy that used that bucket before is transferring fertilizer from one tank to another. And so he sent eight samples. And every time you mixed up the sample in the bucket, the soil tests went down. So the eight samples are a lot lower than the first one. But so I said clean is what it really means. It has to be clean. And then you need two bags, one for the zero to six and one and one for the six to 24. Because you want those samples separate. And then make sure that you get the subsoil in the subsoil bag and the topsoil in the topsoil bag. And there's a guy in a blue shirt back there that sometimes gets that wrong. And I don't know how he does that because I accuse my people too of turning them around. But sometimes I have to go run the subsoil to get the right topsoil answer. So those are some of those things. And then the other part, and this is an old South Dakota thing that we use. But then I tell guys to do 10 to 15 probes. Ideally, we'd like to have you take 10 to 15 probes or soil slices out of that area, your sampling area, to mix together for a composite sample. And I say 10 to 15, knowing that by time you get to eight, you're about done. And so you need to try to get to 10. And I know sometimes when I went as a servitech and crop consultant said, the guy said, I'll go with you and watch you take samples. And after about the sixth probe, he said, I'll get out. I got other things to do. So understand it does take time to do a good accurate sample. And understand the roots are grown in all that soil. So you want a uniform slice of six inches and then six to 24. So the NRDs in Grand Island, Nebraska, Central Platte, started regulations in 1987. They said take a three foot sample for nitrate. And so there were guys that were taking the post old digger digging three feet down and taking the sample out of the bottom of the hole. I said, no, remember the roots are grown in all that soil and we're trying to get measure what the roots are doing. So these are kind of the sampling things. Now we now we got grid sampling. In the dry land guys, it's probably a little bit tougher to even think about this. But and I wrote this slide a few years ago, new technology using GPS. And we started a lab in 1983 and Carney and and people say, did you ever vision having such a big lab as we have today? And I said, when we started in 1983, we didn't even know what GPS was. All those, all that technology that's come about. So, so things really changed. And so it's just a matter of driving around and taking samples. And some some guys are a lot of the guys are two and a half acre grids. And some are 4.4 acres. And then we do have a few people that go down to 1.1 acre grid. And then the other interesting thing on the irrigation side of it in the Platte Valley, there are some areas that farmers are good sampling the same fields every year, because they can save enough on by putting a variable rating their fertilizer on, that they can justify the cost of the sampling to to make the fertilizer recommendation. And when you're growing 300 bush of corn, there's a good expense of fertilizer involved in that. So that makes a difference. Here's here's from a field on our farm. And I grew up in southeast Nebraska. So this is a quarter section that we had down there. And just to show the example of why you might want to do that. And we have some fairly decent tests in here. But right here is right there are some very low tests. And then you can put fertilizer on there. And these are very high ones. And you can skip that and save some money. And the average for the field would be 23 if you took one composite sample. And so you say you can put the fertilizer on where is really, really needed and kind of make some economics out of that kind of thing. So that's the sampling. You guys got any questions on the sampling part or anything? Because it's amazing. I still have been working on this since 1961 is when I started in South Dakota State. And I still get calls. How do I take a soil sample? So it's a very important part of doing things correctly. Because the fertilizer costs are pretty much that you really need to pay attention to that. Yeah. No, I would leave the duff layer on there because if you're doing no tail like you're supposed to be doing, the roots will grow right in that duff. And so that's part of the fertility. One time I was in urban Illinois giving a talk and the guy that kind of asked me to come in and speak, he was talking, he was talking about potassium. And he made a comment and he said roots don't grow in the top two inches of the soil. And I just solidified him and said, if you stop cultivating, they would. So it's just amazing what if you get out and dig a little bit, you can see how the root system out grows. So I just put this up there on fertilizer and make it a fertilizer efficient. We know about the soil health and all those movements going on. But thinking about just the fertility part, the most important one is oxygen. Roots and microbes are like us. They breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. So we want a good porous soil, good aggregated soil, good granulated soil to get air to move in and water to move in. And then biological activity, if we've got good biological activity with the cover crop stuff and all that, they're supposedly, I think this is true, and the microbes help dissolve the nutrients and bring them to the plant because the plant roots are just there. And if we have this biological activity really going, we can make our fertilizer applications much more efficient and so we can reduce our application rate and still be able to grow the crops that we're planning on growing. And if you do the tillage and kill a lot of that microbial life, then it takes more of the input to get the same place. So I make those some big gliders and of course you understand the temperature and that stuff. But I just threw this out here. I had a soil, I had a student who's in the soils class that's teaching at the University of Nebraska-Carny and we did a little experiment on water holding capacity, trying to measure that. So we put this soil in a graduated cylinder, 100 100 mils, we put 100 grams of soil in and then we run 10 mils of water down the side of the tube so the water go down and then we could calculate how many grams of soil was wet and get a percent water holding capacity. We put in this conventional till soil and the water set up on top, if you can see that up there, there's water still there. And so I told him to cover that and we'd check it the next day, come back the next day and there's this air gap right in there. And you begin to think about the stuff I said on the oxygen and the bio-lateral activity. Well the water set there and moved down here, you can kind of see right here there's a wetting front, soil here is dry, here it's wet some. But as water goes into the soil it takes, it goes into the pores and what's in the pores? Air and if water's coming in air's got to go out. Now the head of that water's pushing down on that but that top was so sealed because there's no aggregation, all the, let's say, go mailing and the microbes are all gone and there's sealed soil. You know the good old crusted soils we used to have and you'd have to get the rotary oil out and break the crust to get stuff to grow. That's what happened. Separated the sand, silt and clay particles, water wouldn't go down and air couldn't get out and it pushed that soil up and so that's the only way I can really demonstrate what I mean by having good soil structure get air to come out. So you think about that a little bit so when water goes in the water pushes air out and that air coming out is CO2, carbon dioxide and then the plants use the water and air goes in and oxygen's coming in. So the soil is, you know, that living structure we're talking about, it's actually a great big lung breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide and so the better we can keep that structure, better we can keep it protected from the raindrop, the better things are going to grow all that kind of stuff. Fertilizer recommendations based on crop and yield goal will make recommendations based on the crop and the yield goal that you're going to grow. Past crop, if we had legumes or cover crop in that we'd like to know that because we make some adjustments in nitrogen. Of course there's all test values and then we send you the recommended rates that we think you need to have and then you have to decide on what method application. I don't get involved in application methods because some people ask how do you put fosters on and I learned over time there's two ways to do, either you do or you don't. So you can decide the other. And just a little bit of science here, this is a root tip and there's kind of a gelatinous stuff that comes out and makes the root kind of lubricates the root so the cells divide at the root tip and then they elongate and that pushes the root forward and then after the cells elongate then these little root hairs come out which increases absorption for water and nutrients then they live for about 24 hours and then they slough off and then you have a conduit for taking water and nutrients up the plant and for bringing foot of synthate down or the sugar down to for cell division. And so we need the root growing at all times and the root will grow where it's the softest. Gravity will pull them down but if you hit a compacted layer or something they will go horizontal instead of vertical and those but that's the way the roots grow. This is a right plant I pulled this spring and a cover crop we had and and so the microbes really like to live around those all the living roots and we talked you know Doug talked about the living root in the soil and the living roots supply food to the microbes and the reason that soil is hanging on those those roots is because the microbes are on there and making all that stickiness that the glue the sands haven't played together and so it's hanging on that that can tell you if you have a pretty active soil life or not just by looking at those roots. Now if you pull them out of dry soil they're going to strip all that stuff off but I don't want to sweat it's kind of fun to pull those and and take a look at that and then then some other people say well you got to put the fertilizer in a certain place and there's a root system on a myelo plant so where would you place the fertilizer? So that's why I say that if you put it on the roots will find it and there might be some efficiencies and that kind of thing but but just think of that a cow she takes in the food at one place the root takes it in at the tip of all those roots so and then the big helper I couldn't find a better picture I guess right now but this our muscular fungi micro isofungi infect the root hair they're going through a root hair or something and then they come out they got this mycelium that goes out and pulls in water and nutrients they can dissolve some bedrock there's really some fantastic things that talk about so we depend on this soil I have to bring bring the nutrients to the to the plant so so the the soil test so let me ask this question any any questions about that part right now then we'll go into individual tests so the the first one we have is pH and I and I I kind of like to know on a soil the first thing I'm going to look at is what the pH is when you start asking me questions you know I want to know what that pH is and sometimes I kind of have to know your area to kind of get that idea too but but we have in our lab we have pretty I don't know what kind of kind of robot time equipment a lot of auto samplers and that kind of stuff so back in here there's two electrodes there and so it's reading two soil samples at a time and there's 180 samples on here and we have four five of those instruments and so in November we're running about 4,300 soil samples a day and pH was one of those that we run on all the samples so the pH neutrals how do I call six two to seven two if it's very acid it'd be less than five one you don't know if you have any of those kind of soils in your area up and we have a customer up in New England North Dakota that I'm surprised how low the pH's are in some soils so you're always surprised at what what comes out of that and then alkaline seven three to seven eight not really too much a problem but when they get them seven nine up to eight point eight point four could be pretty serious problems growing growing some crops anyway and you had kind of have to pick crops and pick varieties of crops that would grow in those higher pH's at the low they're very low on here acid if when the pH gets down to five aluminum starts being dissolved and come out and aluminum is toxic to a lot of plants and so that I asked a question sometimes where's the aluminum come from so Marty I asked I shouldn't pick on Marty though the clays the clays in the soil most of soil minerals in the clays are alumnus silicates so they're made up of aluminum and silica and some other ions but those are too many so the low pH's just start dissolving the soil and so we want to avoid that probably not a problem out here and then the buffer pH is the way we measure the total acidity the the pH is a it's a soil water combination and the ions that are in the move out in the liquid into water and cause a pH but there's a lot of hydrogen ions sitting on the exchange complex and and the buffer can measure it goes in what I say goes in scrapes all the hydrogens off the exchange complex and then that tells us what the total acidity of that soil is and that tells us then how much lime we need to put on but again probably and and then the soluble salts I know in parts of South Dakota salinity salt salinity salt seeps and that kind of stuff it's pretty important and so if we whoops if it's 0.1 to 0.75 no crop hazard and I put 0.1 here because we get soils with the less than 0.1 and those are pretty much dead soils it's what I call them they they don't have a microbial activity to make soluble things out and so usually when you're when you see a really low one there's things you can do because the the guys in a no-till they'd always be up around 0.2 0.3 which is really good and then 0.75 to 1 real reduction on sensitive crops and then this is when you get in the 1.5 to 3 this is on 1 to 1 soil solution not a saturated paste and and then you then you start really losing yield at 3 you may not be able to grow a lot of crops and of course above that serious serious yield reductions and and I see some of those those kind of things in some of the salt seeps around where guys are sampling those what are the soluble salts there calcium magnesium sulfate nitrate those are the main ones saline seeps would be one that's really above 1.5 would be called a saline seep if it's alkali or sodic we used to call it alkali they call it sodic now those are the soils that are maybe not not real high on salts but they're high on sodium and a sodium disperses the clays so water can't move into the soil so so you have the distinction if you have a saline soil and low sodium gypsum is not going to help you if you have a low saline soil or low salt salts and a high sodium then gypsum is the best thing you can use so there's lots of interpretation on on this kind of table here so when if you have a saline seep and somebody's trying to sell you some more salt to put on to help be aware of what you might have you might just be adding to the problem organic matter my time's kind of getting short here and stuff this but i'm going to i'm going to point to this one right here build soil fertility enhance crop productivity we'll understand those things and improve the structure but uh one percent organic matter contains in in the top six six to seven inches soil one percent again contains a thousand pounds of nitrogen if you got five percent organic matter you got five pounds five thousand pounds of organic nitrogen in the soil and and that's what dug was talking about the the percent release of that nitrogen uh in his his research uh 220 pounds of p205 140 pounds of sulfur and all the other plant nutrients in there so if you want to increase organic matter in the soil you have to have kind of balanced fertility or good fertility to be able to get that to happen and and uh you can't do it with fertilizer has to be organic and through microbes and incidentally uh do i and i just somebody just sent or Matt our buddy down in Kansas sent that but that article on uh somebody discovered that you're in case organic matter soil by passing the carbon through a microbe well how in the hell else do they think it happens it's just amazing to me sometimes what the scientists discover and uh you guys have taught us all these things but but yeah that the uh microbes have to take take all the the organic material and decompose that and if you have good fertility and all the nutrients are there then it'll build organic matter if you're cheating on some element and it's deficient in the soil the microbe would dissolve that organic matter to get that nutrient out of there and then it'd be really tough building organic matter because you got these ratios and and sometimes when a siren can raise a organic matter test real fast uh so where in heck did you get all those nutrients to do that so kind of think about how we're trying to improve our soil and maybe animal manure is part of that the part to get all these other nutrients who've been taken out because we you're 17 elements of course two of them are H and oxygen H2O water and one is carbon dioxide so there's three of the elements so you got 14 elements that the plant uses out of the soil and uh they all have to be an organic matter so the nitrate test is the next test I like to look at and that measures the residual nitrate in the soil and uh so the extracts are over here on these test tubes each test tube is a different different soil sample and the up here is they're labeled so we identify the samples in those rows runs through here and makes the color and their term is the color the more darker the color the higher the reading will be on that we call this a latchet flow jet flow injection analysis instrument and that's how we run our nitrate and our phosphorus uh measures carry over nitrate and and i've got to speak you know in a couple weeks in the skyline nebraska the guy just started in rd over there and and he said there's an argument that the 200 pounds of residual nitrate left in the soil will not be available for the next crop you know my god you know somebody's selling something that isn't isn't really needed if you had 200 pounds of nitrate left in your soil you don't need to fertilize you know just it's that simple isn't it and the idea is at the end of your cropping season you should have that nitrate less than five part per million and ideally it'd be better to be less than three and if you got over five part per million you put too much on for the crop you got and so that's kind of a guideline sometime you can use it's and it's nice to know you got it there for next year but it's nice to know that i'm you i'm utilizing my nitrogen well or i really got to pay more attention my management and then a nitrogen requirement how much nitrogen is in the plant as it's growing and you know i've kind of used these systems uh when i was a south to go state and started nitrate testing you use in 1.4 when i moved to carney in 1983 i was used in 1.3 and in farmers after 15 years they started to criticize me because my recommendations are too high so i dropped it to 1.2 and after the drought in in 2012 i dropped it to 1.1 and now i'm being criticized because i'm a little bit too conservative but the grain in the in the case of corn 0.67 pound of nitrogen is taken out with a grain on the average we're putting on 1.1 or saying that needs 1.1 so that's 0.43 pound of nitrogen that's left over where does that nitrogen go and and so it kind of stays in organic form in 2012 we had uh heat and drought and the fur irrigators you know they would irrigate and then it would get dry out before they get back to irrigate again and then it would they put water on and dry out then they put water on and dry out and so i had a farmer uh at Bertrand Nebraska had enough nitrate in the top eight inches of soil to produce 240 bushels of corn without any putting without putting any nitrogen on now all of a sudden it just just come out and when you have a dry season and you get a rain and then it goes dry again and you get a rain then you plant oats on that and try to graze it or something then you lose some calves it's because those microbes when they the first things that start growing and bacteria and then it dries out so they die off and then when they get another rain and the bacteria come back and eat their buddies and release more nitrogen and you do that cycle three or four times and you got high nitrate in the soil not from anything you put on but just from what the microbes are doing and so so kind of remember that in real drought years if you get wetting and drying if it stays dry all summer it doesn't matter but the wetting and drying is what increases the nitrate so and you can say if you got high residual nitrate you can save money on fertilizer nitrogen fertilizer for that here so so it's very important to do that but these are the requirements that i use south to coast state i think is 1.2 on nitrogen and 2.5 on wheat but these are what i'm using in in our lab so we're pretty close on all those all those things and then oh man that's kind of messed up if we got alfalfa in here we use 100 pounds if it's good alfalfa is half a stand 50 pounds and of course if it's mostly grass we don't give you any credit for the alfalfa clovers and cover crops i got in here 50 to 80 in our computer program we subtract out 40 but but we can get quite a bit of nitrogen sometimes out of those clover crops and i think Doug showed that now soybeans here is 40 to 60 and so so you always have to remember what the past crop was and and the legumes gave you that free free nitrogen so to speak and and the other crops won't now the the summer is tall grasses but they have organisms that fix nitrogen for them so so you really don't need nitrogen on any summer grasses yeah do i do i see any difference in the nitrogen fixation from moving from moist to more dry areas and i do not see that and it would be a little bit on an amount of production and and i know i've i think i'm pretty right on this but a lot of a lot of people say the nitrogen stored in in the nodules but the nodules are fixed in nitrogen for the plant to grow and so as the plant grows the nitrogen is is above above ground and and so the more more top growth you get the more nitrogen you're going to get is is kind of the way you judge that too so in and the legumes that have 40 to 50 pounds of nitrogen per ton of dry matter soybeans uh they say that but the soybeans drop their leaves and that's where the nitrogen's in the leaves and that leaves decompose for the next crop and they're high in nitrogen again where corn leaves aren't that high thanks for the question so just a calculation uh pounds of nitrogen yield times the nitrogen requirements subtract the residual nitrate subtract the legumes subtract manure subtract irrigation water and you'd have to do those we we would do the residual nitrate we would subtract that and if you don't send in a subsoil and we assume it's any one of those bad words you know we assume there's 25 pounds in that subsoil so so sometimes if it's less than that you'd get a little higher retinitis recommendation if you took the deep samples of course if you had a higher higher nitrate than five part per million then then you could reduce your rate there's an example i got wheat after corn 60 bushel times 2.4 144 pounds of nitrogen 24 pounds in the top soil uh 24 pounds in a subsoil so 144 minus 48 96 pounds of nitrogen that's that's how we'd make that recommendation but in this case without if we didn't have the subsoil we'd subtract 25 well it's the same it'd be the same recommendation and i throw these charts in this is corn again but but all the plants grow similar and and in in the grain you get grain production up here about 40 percent of the nitrogen is taken up after after heading or after uh tasseling those kind of things so we we need nitrogen early to get good rapid growth but there's not much taken up early in the growth that's when it's growing fast is when the nitrogen's taken up so sometimes if you if you kind of see things that don't look right you can go out and put nitrogen on and not really hurt your yield if you get it on you know in this stage growth here when it's starting to grow rapidly you still haven't hurt yourself any like that kind of stuff to manage and the corn guys would try to really work with them on that now phosphorus is another flow injection analysis and phosphorus is not soluble it doesn't move very far in the soil maybe three quarters an inch a year and uh phosphorus is not fixed but remains available for future use by plants one of those things that i i guess maybe even i used to teach it even that you only got 20 to 30 percent of the phosphorus in that first year and and that's about all we ever said but rest of the phosphorus whatever you take that first year rest of it's still there and and if you put more on and what the crop uses over time the soil test to build up so you don't have to add anything to phosphorus to make it more available unless you really got the money to spend and some of those kind of things but but uh what what's a good soil test and i got olsen in princys here and then this is malik three or bray malik uh i got acquainted with malik in 1975 when i went to okloma state eight off had developed a double acid method for southeast united states and and he was back he was retired he came back was doing research at north carolina and he come up with this malik three which caught my attention because the first two things he told me that he's putting in there was half the bray concentration and i thought you know finally he's agreeing with bray bray was in illinois and he developed guess what kind of soils we have out here they're called calcareous and uh we learned that if you had a high line soil or calcareous soil the the bray would go to one part per million two part per million and you were told or we were told told you that like a lime tied up the phosphorus and uh what really happened was the lime made the bray test no good so so i had a crop consultant that at north platt and when i started the lab down dot city he sent me samples and he said bray says we've been sending the university of america been getting one part per million bray and and we sent it to you and he got the same test what's going on we've been putting 200 pounds 18460 on a year and you're still getting one part per million tests and i so i looked at the tests i said myelin i got a new test that malik developed i'm going to run that i'll set that up and run that and we'll see and so i run that malik test and got 94 part per million well the other question he had was we're not seeing a yield response the phosphorus are putting on the bray test is one and the malik three was was 94 so so so you have to pick a test that works on your soil is the point i'm trying to make so the olsen test uh sterling was at uh at csu color out of state he was a r s but he was a color out of state and so he developed a an extractant that would get phosphorus out of the high ph or high calcareous soils and it's an interesting one uh the bray well the malik is a ph of 2.6 and the olsen ph is 8.5 that's the extracting ph's so one is in the acid extract another one's an alkali extract and they both pull phosphorus out which is what you think about it's kind of interesting too how these guys come up with these ideas but uh whichever test you use i think if you're if you're higher in 13 or higher in 23 on irrigated you probably don't need to put any phosphorus on and and now the other if you're 20 or 13 how much lower can you go and dwayne dwayne's running a phosphorus or olsen p 5 part per million gets no response to phosphorus put on but so so that's in a healthy soil that's when you got the microbes working on all these things helping you and i asked dwayne how do we if we got this good active healthy soil how much can we reduce our fertilizer application because we're going to be so much more efficient and this is one and so what's it take research and nobody's doing the research so so i guess dwayne will have to depend on the growers to help us out on some of these things that we uh we really really need to help you on deciding on what level should you be at but you know and dwayne uh we did that for him we run totals on on some of his soil samples then i understood a little bit why he was getting by he says normally it's about 400 part per million and a total phosphorus in the soil and he was at 800 so it uh it was pretty good soil to be in with and it's just soils blowing up out of the Missouri River i think is not where that the source of that soil is less out of the river valley oh okay could be the one but yeah it's kind of interesting and so there's a whole bunch of things we need to look at and he's trying to help us on some of this too but those are those are my ideas and the other ideas that when it's above a certain number don't put any more on and that means manure or phosphorus fertilizer damn it we got too many guys that are polluting water because they have to keep putting it on and usually it's the guys closest to the big feed yards so what do you think about starter and wheat though? starter and wheat probably uh if you're going to use phosphorus on wheat i'd put it with the seed yeah but you should use it even if you have some no no no and maybe dwayne would disagree but he said he wants to know if if they put if the phosphorus test above 50 or or 33 should he still put starter on the wheat i'd i'd just seem to keep my money yeah okay that's why i think i don't want to spend any more than possible and these are kind of this is just some rough simple guideline of in a very low test 60, 35, 20, 10 and south to coast states going 10 part per million 10 pounds of petal five in that 12 to 15 range here but uh i think if you got if you bet no telling and you're doing some cover crops you can these would be good good equations and drop that 10 off they don't worry about that so and the phosphorus is interesting because it some people say you know that starter fertilizer you see in them in the spring you put on corn and it jumps kind of jumps and gets growing but in v6 knee-high still only three percent of the phosphorus taken up so you have to have phosphorus kind of out in the soil for all the roots that take up and then a lot of it's taken up 40 percent at least 40 taking up after after pollination fertilization and and so you need to have phosphorus there for the whole crop again and this is the other kind of instrument we have in the lab it's called icpa ap amine icap it's inductively coupled argon plasma if anybody has argon welder they know how high temperature that is how it cuts the metal really easily and that's what that flame in there is uh and it has a real high temperature and every element gives off light and every element has a different wavelength of light and a computer can pick up or this one can pick up those wavelengths for the certain elements and then with these extracts these extracts here we're running zinc iron manganese copper on the soil extracts and it's rating a sample every 22 seconds a result for them at one time and then we use the same for potassium calcium magnesium sodium same as we got nine of those instruments in our lab now potassium dryland 160 part per million k and on the on the irrigated 200 some of the guys growing 300 bushel corn down nebraska a debate if 200 is high enough but nobody's really come to say i'm wrong there's some people that do weird stuff but but they really haven't given me any any information it would be potassium deficiency potassium tests are dropping i think all over in south dakota nebraska because we haven't been we told we told you guys you didn't need potassium so we haven't been putting very much on but we are extracting it every time you take something off the land especially forages off the land you take a lot of potassium off so keep it keep that in mind as you're going on and the recommendations they're not they're not too bad normally going being this 81 to 160 so you know 30 30 to 50 pounds of 0060 would be nice to have and then if you put that the 0060 on that's potassium chloride so when you put in 0060 40 45 percent chloride so you get the chloride naturally if you put that little bit of potash on some of those things that think about and the interesting one the nutrient difference potassium almost all the potassium is taken into the forage before reproduction starts so before tasseling or seed seed formation so so that's why we have to have the bigger test is because it's such a big demand while the crop is growing sulfur these are South Dakota state recommendations zero and this is pounds of sulfur I didn't put that on it in the in two feet they calculate out the pounds of sulfur in two feet we really don't do that in our lab but my body takes already takes deep samples and a lot of his sulfur and that's why I've seen the the high sulfate in the in the six to 24 inch depths but here here's the ones that they call and then then we do it we use point point point two two pounds per bushel on the corn point 32 pounds on on wheat and just an example on the wheat point 32 for the time 60 bushels 19 pounds of sulfur the sulfate test we had a 14 pounds breaker in two feet of soil 19 minus 14 is five pounds of sulfur breakers recommended if it's a sandy soil we'd increase that by 20% so increase it to six pounds in this case so the sandy soils need a little bit more sulfur they're normally lower in organic matter and we've we've used a lot of sulfur a lot of our soils over the past out of the organic matter and in Nebraska we got finally our organic matter would not decompose any further we stabilize it down here to about 30 or 40% of what we had to begin with wouldn't give out any more sulfur and so we got a lot of uh sulfur going on or a lot of us been recommended because the the soil if you have high organic matter you probably can still get the sulfur out of there if you're trying to build organic matter and you're taking sulfur out of the organic matter you just destroy an organic matter so it's kind of concepts you got to think about uh calcium magnesium sodium it's part of the base saturation and in some areas people talk a lot about base saturation and cc a cation exchange capacity uh base saturation percent k percent as percent potassium percent calcium percent magnesium percent sodium and the base saturation should be 70 percent or greater because hydrogen is the other the other cation and it should be less than 30 percent if the hydrogen is over 30 percent you need to put lime on as soon as possible because that means the pH is getting pretty low and the other one if sodium percentage is greater than 5 percent there's a problem with dispersion in the soil in the alkali or sodic soil being formed and and so you really got to watch that one closely in a lot of our soils in South Dakota where the saline seeps are sometimes they're high sodium most of the time they're low sodium but uh you need to watch that and that test tells that i had a guy down in in an apples last week the national no-till conference he said ray what what uh what percent calcium do you want your base saturation i said yeah you know i want calcium there i don't care what the ratio is and and it's kind of hard to understand and in summary the calcium magnesium concept is unproven and should not be used for basic fertilizer or liming practices there's still people that talk about albrecht the albrecht system and albrecht was at university of missouri in the 30s and 40s and still going back to that old research and there's been plenty of stuff to having sufficient calcium magnesium as a proper method of evaluation uh zinc uh we use a dtp extract is developed by willow lindsey at colorado state uh corn is is probably the most sensitive crop the zinc weight and other small grains require less zinc but if you got that in rotation you kind of want to try to get your zinc test build up to one part per million and if it's over one part per million you don't have to put any zinc on until it drops below one part per million and the wheat corn dryland uh probably take out in uh two years maybe a tenth of a pound so it's so it's not very used very much but a lot of our soils are low in zinc in south coast not as bad as it is in uh in nebraskan but a lot of zinc has been put on so there's the recommendation on that and and i say here divide rate by six for a mount per year uh we we make a corrective application kind of kind of like lime we rate so many lime so many tons of lime to correct the acidity and then it might take 10 15 years before it drops down to have to lime again and it's kind of a zinc we make a zinc corrective application it'll take six to ten years for it to drop back down but uh if you're trying to use chelate you want to put it with 10 34 oh you have to you cannot mix more than one pound of zinc and seven gallons of 10 34 oh that would be uh seven one pound of zinc to 30 pounds of p205 if you use an orthophosphate fertilizer you have to use edta chelate which is the most expensive chelate and because uh other zinx will precipitate the phosphate so you gotta be very careful if you're trying to mix zinc in with a starter fertilizer that kind of thing if you use dry you can go ahead and put a high rate on but but but the point is that the rate so we recommend here will last for six years or more so what what is uh what's my thoughts on ortho versus polyphosphate fertilizer and uh they're both they're both good fertilizers they both supply the phosphorus one is quite a bit cheaper and i'm for the cheaper one there's no other proof than that and and for the guy that says uh well my fertilizer is three times more effective than than your fertilizer and so you don't you have to use you can use less but you think about that if i if i need 30 pounds of phosphate and i put 10 on in in 10 years i'll be 300 versus 100 i'll be 200 pounds short that you know that's kind of what you gotta think about it well how do how do they make how do they get that efficiency into that fertilizer when somebody says my fertilizer is more efficient than yours how do they calculate that it's based on the price their price compared to your price and so to make price price competitive you have to have the efficiency does not do a plant nutrients see you want to add up to plant nutrients not not effectiveness or efficiency or those kind of things good good question did you ask one other one ammoniated ammoniated ammoniated in 1030 40 is good in fact most of the key lights other than edta and ammoniated zinc they all convert to that polyphosphate sequester they all convert to that except for edta so so the ammoniated zinc is is good any other questions marty's getting up i must be about to run out of time manganese uh this is south coast states recommendation i had a had a guy working southwest oklah southwest nebraska they had yellow corn on the slopes and on the republican river and i went down there one time and the corn just looked terrible and i looked at soil tests and i made a recommendation of some manganese sulfate ammonium sulfate 1152 and i don't know what else but i went home and and then i called mori vittosh is a south philly guy in michigan state because they use a lot of manganese up there and i told him what i'd recommended broadcasting 25 pounds of manganese sulfate and he just laughed at me he said it won't work and and you know the guys never called me back down there or not and a few years ago i found out that the guy that that had the company uh dewy had a dewy mix that he was selling to all the guys in those hills in the public river valley and it was mad manganese in it and so i've upped my manganese test to three part per million but i uh not sure that it works anymore outside of that area down there but uh probably don't spend much money on manganese unless you're sure of it and in some areas uh in the menchal area over there knows glaciated soils to the west of menchal there's manganese uh uh extremely high at okola state we'd call them toxic and you wouldn't expect stuff to grow 200 part per million manganese and we're talking about one being sufficient at south dakota state so there's there be aware of some changes that are going on and then i got uh with the chloride this is uh kansas state uh with with uh the amount of chloride being put on over here which i think are probably too high a rates but there's nice response to this first rate of chloride and you could probably get by with about 10 5 to 10 pounds of chloride instead of that high rate and see 20 pounds of 0060 would be eight pounds of chloride so you got an idea what you could put on there and i think uh the chlorides i want to always keep in mind and then boron uh some people are interested in boron but uh we're at 0.25 here for corn and the other grasses alfalfa sugar beets peanuts boron at 0.5 so there's a few crops that need boron but most of them that are growing here you don't need to worry about about boron and stuff and so this is the fertility and some guys want to know what tests to run and go to word laboratories and and so i i usually suggest our routine test which is uh the ph in soluble salts organic matter nitrate phosphorus potassium calcium magnesium sulfur sodium zinc iron manganese copper not boron not chloride and not molybdenum so that's a $19 test and and uh if you don't know what those levels are it sure would be nice to know and if you know what they are then you can get by with the nutrients that you really need to need to worry about but every every five years or so i think i'd do that routine test and then rest of time you could use something a little cheaper nothing's very cheap anymore but our uh what we call mpk test is $14 the whole test is $19 so there's not much difference in those so uh my time is up i got a little bit here on the haney test and sorry i didn't cover those things but doug talked about that a little bit on the plfa this morning and now we got this haney test and it might be a topic for the next time i think we'll give Ray a round of applause