Hello everybody. Good to be here today. And like Sarah said, we're gonna be talking about some alternative fertility sources for Ford systems. We thought this was a pretty appropriate and timely topic given the fertilizer price trends. So you've probably all seen a figure like this in the last year or so. This one is showing from November 2020 up through November 2022. So the last two years, the changes in fertilizer prices for urea, DAP, MAP and potash. And you can see they have obviously increased a lot and they remain elevated for at least the time being. So with that, increase, prices have been up to 110 to 100.260% higher over those, over these last two years. So we're here to talk about maybe some alternatives, some things to think about when it comes to fertility for forages that are not related to or are related to, but are not commercial fertilizer that we might be using. Also. It's just to go along with it. So this is just the numbers for each of those nutrients on a per pound basis. So urea DAP and MLP, I just threw that up there because we're going to be referencing this as we go throughout the presentation today, I'm doing some calculations to see I'm the nutrient content of these different alternative sources and how much that turns into in terms of $1 on $1 basis. So I don't have to tell you this. You all know that soil fertility plays a critical role in forage systems for many reasons, right? So we have establishment and root growth and nutrient uptake and all these different reasons why fertility is important. So even when fertilizer prices are high, we still need to be mindful of soil fertility and making sure that we have our soil fertility on track for forages. And this is just a visual to illustrate that. So this is a picture taken down in North Carolina. You can see actually these are on the same field. If you look, Let's see if I can, up here in the upper left corner, you can actually see where this field is. So they were taking in the same field at the same time. The only difference between these two photos is that fertility was applied on the picture on the right and not on the picture on the left. You can see the difference there in the establishment of those forages. So this is why we say even in times when input costs are high and we still need to be mindful of that. I come from an animal science backgrounds. So just like sub-optimal energy or suboptimal protein and the ration of our livestock is going to limit their production, sub-optimal nutrients and our soil is going to limit our forage production. Those forages do need nutrients. So when we think about the forest nutrient cycle, including fertilizers as well as many other things. I like to think about it as a cycle, right? So we have a series of inputs coming in. We have a series of outputs going out. Inputs can include fertilizer, but it can include other things as well. So there's mineralization naturally occurring in the soil. We have manure that may be deposited on that soil, feed or minerals that we're providing to livestock that contribute to the input side of that. And of course, if we have legumes present, we have some nitrogen fixation happening. On the output side of things. We of course are harvesting forages sometimes. So hey, Belege, other forms of harvested forage or removing nutrients from that system. Livestock and their products are also removing nutrients from that system, as well as some loss pathways, which of course we try to minimize, but we'll always have a little bit of loss happening. So today we're going to talk basically about everything except fertilizer, all of the other things that can be inputs. The thing here is both for harvested for its situation as well as for grazing situation. These forages are removing nutrients but to a different extent. So we'll get to that in a minute. But because we're removing nutrients, if we are consistently taking nutrients away, sometimes those outputs can start to outweigh the inputs that are going into that cycle. And that's when we start to mind the soil for nutrients. And just like with any of our crops, this may be sustainable for a short period of time. We may not see a right-of-way of a yield loss or a production loss. But over time that is going to happen and we are going to start to see things suffer. So we said that harvesting and grazing forages removes nutrients. Hay production or any harvested for each has a really big disadvantage, right? We're removing a lot of nutrients from that system. And what are we doing with those nutrients were usually feeding them elsewhere or selling them or taking them off the farm or to another field. So we're seldom feeding that hey, back on the same field. So we're really removing a very large percentage of those nutrients when we do that. In contrast, a grazing system has much more of an internal cycle happening as the livestock are consuming that forage. What's happening? It's coming, some of it is coming out the other end. We have manure and urine being deposited back on that field. And there is a high percentage of nutrients that are continuously cycled integrating system. If we look on a similar land base. So if we have an equal amount of land. For a hay production versus livestock production. In this case of beef cow-calf operation, we compare the amount of nutrients removed under each of those systems where a similar land base, we can see it's much, much greater for that harvested for IT systems. So we can say there's three tons of hay in this example, removes 150 pounds of N versus only 16 for the livestock products. The hay would remove 22 pounds of P versus only five through the livestock products. And the Haywood remove 155 pounds of K versus only one for the livestock products. So you can see the big advantage that grazing systems have there in terms of nutrients cycling. So how those harvested forages remove a lot of nutrients. Remember that this differs a little bit based on what we have growing there, right? So different forages will remove slightly different amounts, but you can see the numbers are fairly similar. Looking across the board, don't forget that this is pounds per ton. So every ton of additional forage is more nutrients that we're removing from that field. So the more productive we are, the more nutrients we're actually removing from that field. So a higher yield equals a higher nutrient removal and we need more nutrients to replace or sustain that yield if we're going to keep that going. So this is where we get into the numbers of the math a little bit. So we're going to use these numbers and assume that one ton of hay contains 45 pounds of N, 15 pounds of phosphate, and 55 pounds of potash. These are those same numbers I showed you at the beginning for the current cost for nutrients. This was as of, I think a couple of weeks ago, $0.90 per pound for nitrogen, $0.68 per pound for pound cash and $0.72 per pound for, sorry, phosphate and $0.72 per pound for potash. If we do the math there, one ton of hay is actually removing currently around $90 per ton in terms of nutrient value, loses a huge amount. You think about some of the haze. The haiti you may see onset for sale online on Facebook marketplace or whatever else. There. Those people are taking a huge nutrient loss in some cases, depending on what that Hey, is priced at. In terms of nutrients. If we have both hay and pasture systems, though, just know that those hay fields are gonna be losing nutrients a lot quicker and we need to be prior, excuse me, prioritizing them over our pastures. I'm not going to really talk about soil testing today, but just your regular, regularly scheduled reminder that soil testing will tell you what nutrients you have present and how quickly those may be being depleted over time if we're not providing additional fertility. So without a test, it's just a guess. So there's your little plug for a soil testing so we know what nutrients we have present in our soil. I'm not going to talk about, of course, like I said, any of the commercial fertilizers or nutrients in that sense today. But I did want to talk a little bit about pH. I know we talked about pH a lot. Sometimes it seems like I'm repeating the same thing over and over. But I think it's really important, especially when nutrient prices and input prices are as high as they are now. Because soil pH plays such a large role on the utilization and availability of minerals to our plants. So this image is showing a range acidity moving from a more acidic to a more alkaline. And you can see each of those bars with the different nutrients represents the availability of that nutrient under that different pH range. So the fatter the bar is, the more available that nutrient is the skinnier the bar is, the less available that nutrient is. It doesn't mean the nutrients not present in the soil. It means it's not available to be taken up by the plant. So acidic conditions can reduce availability of some of our key nutrients like phosphorus, calcium, magnesium. Acidic conditions can also increase availability for some things we might not want to be increased like iron, aluminium. These can sometimes be more available under acidic conditions. For most of our forages, the optimum pH falls in that six to seven range depending on what it is we're growing. So that's where we're gonna be shooting for. And you'll notice that on the figure that range kind of highlights pretty much the thickest part for each of those nutrients. The other thing that we don't often mention for pH, and we always talk about nutrient availability, but we don't often refer to root growth. So this image is just showing some root growth when these plants were grown at different soil pHs. So you can see the one on the left is more in that ideal range, pH 6.5 versus the two on the right are under a more acidic soil. You can see visually quite easily the difference in the root growth under those different acidic conditions. So all those plants, which one is actually going to be able to extract the most nutrients from the soil. Extracting those water have the most benefits in terms of soil health. Of course, it's the one that has that more ideal pH. So that's just our other reason to be mindful of pH. The good news is that line prices have not increased to the extent that all the other nutrients, nutrients have. Now is really the time to be looking at pH and making sure we're capturing the most nutrients from the soil that we can. Here's just to put some numbers to that. So I wanted to kinda tie in a cost for each of these things. So this figure is showing our main nutrients, nitrogen, phosphate and potash. And you can see there this is just an example of an amount that could be used annually on a pounds per acre basis for each of those. And then what that price is based on again, those current prices. So we're looking at a little over $300 per acre if we're applying those nutrients at that amount. If we think about the reduct, the reduction that we would see in the availability of nutrients if RPA, if our soil was more acidic or our pH was lower. In this example, we're comparing 6.2 or more ideal versus 5.6. As we get below that six, we get down to 5.6 or less. Some of those nutrients are going to be less available. So we see a decrease in efficiency. So even though we're applying those nutrients, they might not, might not be available to the plants. And you can actually calculate the value of that decrease as well. And based on this calculation, It's a little, a little less than $100 per acre that were essentially losing just by having a more acidic soil and losing the availability of some of those nutrients. So make sure we're checking the nutrient availability, the soil pH. We're capitalizing on that, Especially when all of our other input costs are high. Alright, the next one I wanted to talk about was manure. So we can't talk about forages without talking about manure. Really any crops without talking about manure. But we know when you are, is a very valuable source of nutrients. The list you see there, nitrogen and phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, calcium, and magnesium are a lot of the macronutrients that are present in manure. But the other advantage of a newer has is it also contains a lot of micronutrients as well, as well as carbon, which can serve as a source of organic matter. So manure can be a really valuable output from certain systems. This is a figure from the University of Minnesota Extension showing some of the nutrient contents in manure for some of our different species. So we know that depending on the species and the farm and the diet that those animals are eating, and whether it's solid or liquid and how it's handled, all of those factors play a role in the nutrient content of that manure. So some key takeaways here are that poultry litter or poultry manure generally has the highest nutrient content compared to any of our other livestock species. We see that usually occur across the board. Poultry litter usually has the highest percentage of nutrients on a per ton or per pound basis compared to other livestock. The other thing that I wanted to point out is we can look at the nitrogen content that organic versus inorganic fractions that are present in that manure. So the type of manure or whether it's liquid or solid, is going to affect the percentage of those different components. So for this example, you can see beef and dairy, the liquid manures. If we look at the total ammonium concentration, so more of that inorganic fraction, we see it's a little bit higher if we compare that to within the same species to the ammonium in the solid manure, we see a lower content of ammonium in those solid manures. So this is telling us that those more solid manures have a higher percentage of the organic fraction of nitrogen, right? And a lower content of that intron or inorganic fraction. And this is important because that inorganic fraction is where we see a lot more potential loss happening through volatilization and that type of thing. So we can realize that liquid manures are more prone to having some of that than some of our solid manures. And depending on the fractions there, we can use that manure, of course, to offset our fertilizer expenses. That was data from Minnesota. This is same data but from Maryland. I pulled this from the University of Maryland nutrient management team website. So you can see same kind of thing. Again, we see poultry litter usually contains the highest percent. We can actually calculate the amount, again of nutrients and also the price associated with these different manure types. So for this one, if we look at solid cattle manure, in my mind, 0.77 seems very small, like less than a percent of nitrogen in the manure. Like why do I even care at that point, it's so small. But when you actually calculate out how much manure you're going to be applying, you'll, you'll see it actually adds up to be quite a bit. So if we were to take that cattle manure and we were to apply it on a field at ten tons per acre. That is actually 154 pounds of nitrogen that we're applying. So it actually has a substantial amount. When you first look at the percentages, might not seem like it's that much, but it actually comes up to be more of a substantial amount when you calculate it out. We can also attach a price to this so we can use it to compare to some of those commercial fertilizers. So here in this one, if we pull out the poultry litter, again, that's the same numbers for the analysis. We can calculate the pounds per ton there, and we can use the current prices to calculate dollar per ton. So this is based on those November 2022 numbers. And if we add that up, the fertilizer value is just shy of $120 per ton for poultry manure. Currently a huge value of u. Remember, hey, we calculated maybe $90 per ton. So both right now are very high in terms of monetary value in nutrients. So how do we retain the nutrients in that manure? Well, we want to minimize volatilization particular of ammonium ways we can do that incorporation or injection. So I know a lot of farms in the Mid-Atlantic are using no till, which is great. So Incorporation may or may not be a strategy then, but injection especially out my way. So I'm based more in Western Maryland. We have more of the dairies out there. A lot of the dairies are looking at injectors injecting that manure to capture that the ammonia and minimize volatilization. If we're broadcasting it, we usually see a high percentage of loss from ammonia. If we are going to incorporate it. If someone is going to use tillage and wants to Incorporated, do it right away, don't let that sit on the soil surface and volatilize. We lose a lot of the nutrients in that way. Other things we can do our apply our nutrients when the temperatures are lower or fire maneuver when the temperatures are lower, this will also help minimize volatilization. You can see from the figure on the bottom there that effects of soil temperature on nitrification. And once we get above that, 50 degrees Fahrenheit for soil temperature, we see a much higher increase in the amount of nitrification happening. And then of course, things like reducing surface runoff. So being smart about applying on slopes and making sure we're not losing manure to creeks are on hillsides or what have you. I'm making sure we're capitalizing on all of the nutrients and retaining those on the field where we want them to be. Alright, so that's kind of a little bit more looking at it from the harvested forage side, but we can also look at this from a grazing side. We said that grazing has a huge advantage in terms of nutrient cycling, right? A lot of those nutrients are recycled back through the animal. We talk all the time about why rotational grazing is great from a forage standpoint, right? Like you have more force production, we have better forage quality, we have better utilization of that pasture. We have more persistent pastures and 0, those are of course, great things and very valid reasons for utilizing your rotational grazing system. From a nutrient management standpoint, the other advantage to rotational grazing is thinking about how uniformly our nutrients being distributed on that pasture. So e.g. has anybody seen a field that looks something like this before? You see those tufts of grass growing where manure or urine was deposited by the animal. I'm indicating that maybe the field on average is a little bit poor and fertility and where that extra nutrients were deposited, we see an increase in the production. What about what livestock behavior impacts have on that? We know if you've ever seen a herd of cattle that are laying underneath the shade tree. What's the first thing they do when they get up, after they've been laying down, they go to the bathroom, right? So really what they're doing is taking all of those nutrients from the back from the other areas of that field. They're coming lying in the shade and then depositing all of those nutrients in that one spot. So things like, Hey, feeders, water sources, minerals, shade are all areas where nutrients can be redistributed disproportionately within that field. So they actually have done some work looking at this nutrient distribution and different grazing systems and how we can work to improve, kinda make them more even nutrient distribution. If anybody's seen this before, no cheating. But for rotation frequency, how many years do you think it takes to get one manure pile per square yard under a continuous grazing system. Any guesses? Your mountain, someone be brave. Yeah. Ten. Any other guesses? Everyone's shy today. 27 years is what they figured out. It takes to get one manure pile per square yard in a continuous grading system. So the animals just have access to that whole area. But we can improve that. We can use our grazing management to help increase that nutrient distribution. So if we move into more of a rotational system, we can drastically reduce that. If we're using maybe a 2-week rotation that they calculated down to seven to eight years. If we're down to a day or maybe every other day rotation, we can cut that down to a year or two. So we're really much more evenly distributing that manure across that field. And this is what that looks like visually. For each of these images. The darker the shading is, the more piles per 500 sq ft they found. I don't envy the grad student or whoever had to do this work. But the darker the shading, the more dense the nutrients were. The the image on the top is showing one paddock in only a three pasture rotation. So they had much bigger pastures. They were in that pasture for a longer amount of time. It was more similar to a continuous system or a very Low rotational grazing system. And you can see the heavy distribution in those certain areas. There was probably, I'm guessing a shade tree or something there maybe a water source on the figure on the bottom. That's one paddock from a 24 pasture rotation. So they've further subdivided, they've tightened up those paddocks. They moving those animals around more on through different areas of the field and you can see them much higher increase in the density of those nutrients that are being deposited and in more evenly throughout that area. So we can use grazing management to our advantage for lot, for lots of reasons including nutrient distribution. So what about, Hey, has a nutrient source? We already did this calculation for calculating the value of the nutrients. And hey, it's important to note that under a livestock operation when we're acquiring, hey, whether we're buying that, hey, whether we're making it on other fields and bringing it to the barn or to wherever the livestock are. We're bringing in nutrients. So it's an opportunity to get not only livestock feed but also nutrients the livestock are never going to eat 100% every last piece from that bail. So we can use that to our advantage as a way to apply nutrients to our fields. So you can actually, if you don't want to use the book values, you can actually calculate the nutrient content of your own. Hey, if you take a forage analysis, you just have to look at the protein phosphorus, and potassium percentage that's present in your hay and calculate that up to pounds per ton. And then use the conversion factors to actually figure out how many pounds per ton of the different nutrients are present in your hay. So you can do it yourself. Or there's also a book values that we can reference to look at that. But we can use that hey, as a nutrient source and we can ask the same question as for grazing management. How are we distributing nutrients when we're feeding that? Hey, so this is an image from North Carolina State University from the button or beef cattle field lab. They did some grid sampling for soil phosphorus throughout the pasture where the beef cattle were housed. And you can see the larger orange circles are areas where the phosphorus concentration is much higher. The smaller orange circles are areas where the phosphorus content was much lower. Where do you think they were feeding hay in this pasture? Right here. Right where those heavy phosphorus areas are. So that's where the hay was deposited. That's where the animals were eating that hay and also depositing their own nutrients there. And so they got a much heavier concentration of phosphorus there. It makes sense. It's right along the fence line. It's closest to the barn probably was the easiest point of access. They didn't have to drive all the way across the field. We're all guilty of this though, right? Everyone with livestock should be thinking about this and realizing that when we're feeding those animals were putting a lot of nutrients down through that process. So what can we do about that? We can feed hay on our poorest pastures or fields. We can look at that. So analysis we can figure out which areas are the poorest fertility, which need the most nutrients so we can feed hey, there if possible. We can also move those feedings spots around. So there's a lot of different ways to feed hay. You don't have to feed it just in one spot and you can move that feeding spot around throughout the field. This is some more work from Missouri, again looking at nutrient distribution with hay feeding. So the top of that figure is using a stationary ring and each of those little green dots, and that again represents like nutrient deposition or livestock manure pile. So you can see that there's a huge amount, right where those ring Feeders, where we're really depositing those very, very heavily there. But they tried moving that ring around through different parts of the field. And they also tried unrolling that, Hey, and you can see how they greatly improved the nutrient distribution by moving that around or by unrolling that. Hey, I also like to look at these, oops. These over here are just aerial views of that same thing. And you can see here, I don't know if you can see from where you are, but there's all those little dark green spots everywhere throughout that field. And you can also see the damage from where those fears were. Versus down here, there's really not a heavy concentrated, damaged area like there was with the stationary feeder. So another option to improve nutrient distribution in those fields. Alright, what about legumes? Just like rotational grazing, we always talk about all these advantages of legumes, right? They're all true. We have a lot of pros for incorporating legumes into bulk hay fields and pastures. But what about from a nutrient standpoint? Legumes have that ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen, right? So they have that symbiotic relationship with the rhizobium bacteria that allow them to fix nitrogen. Fun fact, do you know how to tell if a nodule is active and healthy active nodule. I'll give you a hint look at the picture. If you cut that nodule and half and it's like that bright pink color on the inside. That means it's a hacky, a healthy active root nodule versus if it's tripled or kind of pale than it's not necessarily active. So we can get anywhere 50-250 pounds of nitrogen per acre per year from those legumes, depending on the species and also depending on the growing conditions. And we'll get into that in a second. But before we do, just note that those legumes are not just accumulating a lot of nitrogen. And then being like, here you go, grasses have some of my nitrogen right there, not just sharing it directly actually with the grasses around them. It's really more of an indirect pathway that, that nitrogen is shared between the legumes and the grasses. So those nodules are not the storage area for that nitrogen that's being accumulated right there. The factory, not the warehouse. So that nitrogen is produced, not where that nitrogen is stored. Where the nitrogen is stored is usually in the top growth, the leafy material that that plant is producing. And so how do we get that nitrogen from that top growth down to the root structures in a plant available form for the grasses to take up. It's happens in several ways, mostly indirectly, the biggest way is through livestock. Through animals. I'm consuming that top growth, consuming that plant material, and then depositing their nutrients back on the soil, which obviously work their way over time down into the soil and maybe become plant available in that way. We also see some turnover in the form of like dead roots or sloughed cells. There's always a certain percentage of root turnover that's happening even on a very healthy plant. As those roots are dying and decaying, we see some nitrogen becoming available to the surrounding neighboring plants. Then there is just a very small amount of direct transfer through that network between the different root systems of the forages. So just know that there's several ways that this happens and it's not just, well, I made all this nitrogen. Here you go, friend. Take some nitrogen. It's more of a direct or an indirect pathway that takes a little bit of time. On that side, it's still a cost-effective way to add nitrogen to a pasture. If we look again at the pricing for nitrogen fixation in terms of pounds per acre per year. Here's just a breakdown of some of our major legume species and what we can expect as a range in terms of the amount of nitrogen that they'll fix anywhere from 50 up to 250 on average. If we calculate that on a price point based on what nitrogen prices used to be more of an average nitrogen price. We were looking at maybe 20 to $100 in value of that nitrogen fixing. At now at the current prices, we're looking more at like 50 to 225 or to a little over $200 in terms of the value of that fixed nitrogen as a nutrient source. So again, just like the, hey, just like the manure, we're adding up a lot of value in terms of nutrients. That nitrogen fixation is a function of yield. So those little tiny baby white Dutch clovers that are everywhere are not fixing much nitrogen and are not sharing much nitrogen with that system as a whole. They've looked at different species here you can see white clover, red clover, and alfalfa. And you can see for each of these, there's a very strong correlation between the yield of that plant and the amount of nitrogen and fixes. So if we want to make the most of nitrogen fixation, we need to be using varieties that are productive. They are going to grow well, they're going to produce a lot. Because that's what's going to also mean a lot of nitrogen fixation happening. We always get asked how much should I have in terms of like a legume percent if I want to mix stand in terms of nutrients and being a productive source of nitrogen for other species. In that Stan, we really need those legumes to make up maybe 30% or more of that. Stan, the caveat here is, it can be really visually tricky to know what percent of, especially clover you have in a stand. So if you look at a picture like this, what percent of clover would you say is present in that quadrant? Anyone have a guess? 70. Anyone else? 40. We all say a pretty heavy percentage, right? It looks like a lot of clover there. This was a project. They actually clipped those forages, separated them out, dry them by species, weigh them. The key here in the top line there is weight, right? So it's the percent by weight. So they actually did the weight on this and it's actually 25% clover. So it looks like a much higher concentration of clover than it actually is just because it was clovers have those big broad leaves. They always look like they're much more to them. But if you actually drive them down, they are, they're practically nothing. So in this case it was 25% legume, 75% grass. The key here was that it's pretty short, right? Like it must have been grazed, are harvested relatively recently. It's only 6 " high. So the clover has started to fill in and look like a lot, but the grasses haven't really kind of kicked back into full gear yet. If we look at this one, it's actually, what do you think this one looks as far as a percent of clover? A lot, a little 5050. No one wants to guess now I've proved everyone wrong. Ten? Yes. So this one looks like a lot lower. It's actually more than the other one on a per weight basis. 30% legume in this 160, 8% grass, 2% weeds. And the reason it looks that way is because this one's a lot taller, it's put on more biomass. The grass is filled in and shading over some of that clover. So my point here is just that it can be deceptive to know the actual percent of a legume you have in your stand. Usually we tend to guess on the higher side. Usually we say like we did on that first one, we say it's at least 50%, it's 70%, is usually a lot lower than that. So don't be afraid if you feel like you're getting a little worried of having too much clover or too much leguminous Stan. You can always, you know, clip, clip one-way a sample if you want or use some other means to kinda figure that out. The other thing with legumes is we can alter the grass to legume ratio depending on how we fertilize. Our management can actually alter how much we have of legumes versus grasses in a stand. So fertilization with nitrogen will always favor the grasses because they're not able to produce their own nitrogen. The legumes have that advantage. So if we add nitrogen to that system, we're, we're automatically favoring the grasses if we don't fertilize with nitrogen and we focus more on the P and K we're fertilizing, favoring the legume component of that system because they are not able to or they are able to fix their own nitrogen. So they're going to have the competitive advantage there. So just keep that in mind when you're working with mixtures, know roughly what the grass versus legume component is. And so you can manage it accordingly, whether it's 5050, it drew mixture or whether it's more heavy on legume or grass side. As far as adding legumes are some of our most common ones, alfalfa, red clover, white clover. All of them can be drilled into a sand if we have an opportunity for renovation, if we set set it upright to minimize competition, we can draw those in. We also have with the clovers, especially the ability to frosty these in right, like most people have heard of frosting on broadcasting that seed out on the pasture in or the Jorge field in the late winter. The key there is we need that freezing and thawing action. We need that seed to soil contact somehow, right? So this is what you're looking for. You're looking for that soil that has that freeze and thaw cycle going on. It has a little bit of that kind of heaving action happening that will help work that seed down into that soil a little bit. Alright, what about annuals? We oftentimes think of annuals for this reason. Using them to extend the grazing season. I'm adding some cool seasons to kind of go further out earlier in the spring, later in the fall, adding some warm seasons to utilize in the summer. We also often think of annuals as a way to repair patches that are damaged or use as a quick source of forage. But what about annuals as an opportunity to kind of boost our soil fertility? Can we, can we use them in that way? I would say that they do have an opportunity or they do create an opportunity to improve our soil health and our fertility, increasing the diversity. A lot of those annuals put on a lot of root biomass pretty quick, so we can get some good soil penetrating roots and they're increasing organic matter using some of them for compaction alleviation. All these things are ways that annuals and cover crops are being used to boost fertility. I wanted to just touch on particular on nutrient uptake. I don't know if anyone has seen any of the results of this study before. This was some of the work done by Ray while he's done a lot of work looking at cover crops and soil and how that nutrient interaction happens there. And in this particular project, I thought it was really interesting. He was looking at a forage radish as a cover crop or as an annual forage. On the left-hand side there you can see depth in centimeters. So from zero ground-level down to 180 cm below the soil surface. And the different colored lines are the treatments. So the two green ones are the treatments that had a radish cover crop grown on them. The brown one is no cover crop going on it. In at each of those soil depths. They were measuring the nitrate nitrogen content of that soil under those different treatments. So why would the two green lines not have, whoops, I keep hitting the wrong. Why would the two green lines not have this big peak here and this big P here. That those big peaks with no cover crop treatment are indicating that there is a much higher concentration of that nitrate nitrogen at that level in the soil. There's this, a huge amount they are present in the soil that we don't see on the radishes. This is telling us that those radishes have reached down into the soil profile, put those roots down, they've pulled some of that nitrate nitrogen back up into the plant. Remember, we said they're storing a lot of that and to leafy above-ground biomass. So they've pulled up a lot of that nitrogen, nitrate nitrogen from down deeper in the soil profile up to a level where we'll be able to utilize it, whether that's crazy or harvested or even just terminating that crop and, and, and having that nitrogen at this more at the soil surface. So annuals can be a way to work on soil fertility as well, even though we don't always think of them in that way. Alright, the other one I wanted to touch on was soil mineralization. So we know that soil organic matter contains nitrogen. And there's naturally a mineralization process. And the soil that allows some of that organic matter to release some nitrogen to some extent. Of course, it's dependent on a lot of different factors. But the more organic matter we have in the soil, the more potential we have for producing some nitrogen that's utilizable, usable, usable by the plant. So a higher soil organic matter means more potential for nitrate mineralization means more potential for that nitrogen to be made available to the plant. The caveat there is usually that organic fraction is pretty tightly bound, right? So we need the soil microorganisms to actually mineralize that and make it into a plant available? Form. But the question here is how much becomes available? It's really tricky to know, like how much of this is becoming available, how much is actually going to be made available to the plant through this process or not. What is going to just remain stable in that organic fraction. So in a perfect world, we want to enlarge that biologically active pool or the amount of nitrogen that's able to be mineralized and made available to those plants without of course, having too much where we are losing nitrogen. And there's some research in the Forge Road in particular that's been looking into this concept. There's a researcher down in North Carolina that's doing a lot different crops. But in this case we're looking at the tall fescue. So he's looking at stockpile tall fescue and you can see as 92 on-farm sites, a huge, huge project over several years in North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, south Carolina, and Georgia. And across all of those sites, what they're doing is comparing the nitrogen mineralization of soil organic matter. How much of that organic matter, nitrogen is made available to the plant versus nitrogen supplied by urea fertilizer at several different levels. So they're looking at this and this huge range. What they're finding is, of course, on average, yield is improving with higher rates of nitrogen fertilizer. So that makes sense, right? We would expect that. That's why we have nitrogen recommendations set up the way they are. The more forage for producing, the more nitrogen we need to support that. So that makes sense. The, the caveat there that I found really interesting and that they also found interesting is all of those sites 20, only 28% had a sufficient yield response to cover the nitrogen cost. This was a few years ago. I admit I should have probably looked up what he used for nitrogen price here. So it maybe a little bit lower than what it currently is, but only 28% actually had enough yield to make up for that extra nitrogen cost for fertilizing that. This case was the stockpiled tall fescue. That means that 72% really didn't need any more nitrogen than what was already present in that soil to make for optimum or at least most economical production. So the caveat there is how do we know as a producer or, and when we're talking to producers, which side we fallen, right? How do we know if we're going to have a lot of organic mineralization or not. The difference between those two groups of 28.72% was they found that some fields had a really high nitrogen mineralization rate from soil organic matter. So they had a good, healthy soils, they had good restructures. They were doing all the right things, if you will. And that amount of nitrogen mineralization was able to support the growth and made it less economical to actually put additional nitrogen on the field. So what does that mean? So we know that soils vary in their nitrogen mineralization potential. A higher nitrogen mineralization means we have a greater ability to supply plants with that nitrogen through that organic fracture fraction, through that mineralization process without adding additional nitrogen. The problem is, we can test soil nitrogen mineralization in the lab, but it's a long, tedious process. It requires several months of processing time. So really not practical from a production standpoint. We're not going to send a sample and wait two months. And before we make any decisions, things are happening much faster than that. So that's the issue. But what they're finding actually is in addition to measuring the nitrogen mineralization on all those sites, they're also measuring what he's referring to as soil biological activity. And they're finding a very strong correlation between soil nitrogen mineralization and soil test biological activity. So this test is one that's much easier for the lab to do. Only a few days, maybe a week at most for the turnaround time. It's a lot quicker and they're finding this really strong correlation between those two components. So their goal is can we use this soil biological activity tests? As a way to gauge how much of that, your organic fraction, the soil is going to be potentially minaret, mineralized or not. A way to determine, maybe make some more decisions on nutrient management or kind of fine tune that a little bit. So in this figure, it's a little busy, I know, but basically this is nitrogen factor. So like one, he put a factor just to reference. One is basically 100%. This is so it's standardized across different crops. So one is like 100% of what you would be applying based on our current recommendation. So this line right here is our standard approach, right? We want to do 100% of what the current recommendation is. We're not factoring in the soil biological activity. We're doing it based on the crop production goal. That's the way we currently do it. They're arguing that maybe we should switch to, he labeled it as the soil health approach, but maybe we should switch to a line that might look more like this, where we factor in this biological activity in the soil. And as the biological activity in the soil gets higher, our recommendation can be reduced to a certain extent. Obviously, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done, kind of fine tuning this, but this is something that they're actively working on. And they think has a lot of potential for the forage world as well as for other crops. I think they're also looking in corn as well. So what happens is there's maybe this very small fraction up here where we're kind of over applying if we follow that new line. But there's this huge area down here where we were applying way more than we needed before. And now we can reduce that and maybe apply at a little bit of a lower level. So this is all still relatively new in the process of being developed. But something that I just wanted to mention today because it's something that people are looking at and might be something that's kinda coming down the pipeline to fine tune more of our nitrogen recommendations for forages. At least. That all ties into the fact that soil is a really dynamic ecosystem, right? So we want to be making sure I like this quote. Your real estate is three-dimensional. So we want to be considering our soil and all of the things that are going into that, the chemical, physical, and biological properties of that soil. If we actually calculate the amount of biomass in organisms in this is pounds per acre below versus above the soil. This example is a pasture systems. So here we have a beef cow on pasture and there's the associated biomass there. And here we have everything below, so surface, so roots and bacteria and worms and nematodes and all those other things. And it's actually in this example, 4.7 times more going on below the soil surface than going on above the soil surface. So I think there's a lot to be said about that and I'll add a lot to think about in terms of soil health and keeping those roots in the soil. Hopefully everything we can do to improve that soil biological activity, improve the health of our soil, is always a goal to provide nutrients in that way. So I'm not going to talk about soil health on, but I just threw up the five soil health principles because I do think that does play a role in fertility and in contributing to the system as a whole. Is that when we think about fertility inputs for forages, I hope in addition to commercial fertilizers, we start thinking about other things. And I know manure and hay and legumes like we all know that those are nutrient sources, but hopefully this has maybe put a little bit more of a value behind some of those, especially with current prices. And given you some ways to think about how they contribute to that whole nutrients cycle. And I think that is everything. So I'm having to take a question if there's time. I just made everyone in expert. Yeah, that's probably true. Did everyone get the breadboard? Sure. That's biological activity. Have we seen any other labs like Sorry. Yeah. There's some that are working on it. I think there are some that already do it. I'd have to look up a specific lab or whatever, but I think there are some that actually have started to do it. The one thing that this researcher always stresses is it is a little bit of like labs specific process, like different labs might have a different way of doing it. So if you're going to start doing it, stick with the same lab. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine.
2022 Crop Management School - Amanda Grev
From Robert Diiorio December 07, 2022
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