AgroInsights- Finish What You Started
August 7, 2023
Keith Flaniken, Sales Agronomist US South
In parts of the southern US, harvest season is underway, and other farms are laid by, but in other areas, there is still plenty of crop management yet to go. The purpose of this week’s article is to remind everyone not to quit nurturing your crop too soon and to Finish What You Started.
Peak demand for moisture and plant nutrition is at or near its greatest demand during late-season growth stages. Below are some thoughts and observations we have learned over the years to maximize late-season potential and nutrient management.
- Although roughly half of the nitrogen required by soybean plants comes from the soil, legumes also need to fix nitrogen through nodulation, known as nitrogen fixation. Since a soybean plant is a legume, healthy and active nodules should populate the roots. We like to dig roots throughout the growing season to give us a snapshot of plant health, growth, and development. A healthy soybean root will have a load of nodules. These nodules should be nice and pink inside, and there should be a lot of them. To enhance late-season nitrogen production and to improve the odds of enhanced yield, many producers choose to add plant-available N & K to their fungicide application. NACHURS NocKout®, applied during pod fill, has proven to be a profitable practice. In your fungicide solution, including one to two gallons of NACHURS NocKout can quickly translocate throughout the plant, feeding it a late-season shot of nitrogen and potash over a period of days. We’ve seen this practice raise yield potential by igniting a flood of nitrogen within the plant, boosting energy and proteins.
- Another key element during flowering and seed development is potassium. If you have ever seen your leaves on any crop begin to turn yellow around the margins and migrate inward late in the season during flowering, odds are you see a potassium deficiency. Most crops are a sink for potassium at this growth stage and can benefit from an available source of K. NACHURS K-fuel®, powered by Bio-K, which has proven to be an excellent source of late-season potassium when foliar is applied. With our newer, higher-yielding hybrids and varieties, we are using and removing much more potassium than just 8 – 10 years ago. We have received more calls and inquiries regarding soybean, corn, cotton, alfalfa, etc., turning yellow toward the end of the season than ever before. Know the difference between nitrogen and potassium deficiencies. They are different. There are many reasons for this…including higher pH soils tying up not only phosphate but potassium as well. Higher yields we are harvesting are using and removing more K than ever before. Our seeding rates have also increased, leaving a deficit amount of plant food for the number of plants and yield potential in the ground. If you need to address low potassium levels late season, consider adding NACHURS K-fuel to your fungicide application on any crop or with your mepiquat application in cotton.
- We have customers who will combine NACHURS K-fuel or NACHURS NocKout plus NACHURS Finish Line® to get a greater bang for their buck.
The bottom line is, don’t quit too early and miss an opportunity to Finish What You Started. We’ve invested too much time, expense, effort, and stress not to try and put our crop over the top, especially if you have a crop that has the potential of being good to excellent. Give your NACHURS dealer a call.
For more information contact your local NACHURS sales manager or sales agronomist.
Pictures below:
W TX corn w/ K-fuel & Finish Line
Peanuts w/ K-fuel & Finish Line
Soybeans w/ K-fuel & Finish Line
Potassium deficiency
K-fuel & Finish Line on wheat
Pivot Irrigated cotton w/ K-fuel injected
Transform Your Harvest: Discover the Benefits of Finish Line®
The effect of foliar fertilization on wheat yield.
We are at the point in the year where things are slowing down around the farm and it is time to reflect on the season to remind ourselves what we learned. Over the last couple of weeks, the District Sales Managers and I have spent some time reflecting on what worked well in the field and the challenges we faced too. Here are the top 5 things we learned from 2024 growing season: #1 Split applying Nitrogen and Sulfur is a practice that should be embraced on a yearly basis when growing corn. Do you remember how the planting season started and what happened in the first 60 days after the planters started rolling? Our field conditions started out dry with some areas of the corn belt showing up on the drought map. Then mother nature blessed us with rain that never stopped in some areas making it difficult to finish planting. Growers that had split applied their Nitrogen and Sulfur were able to avoid nutrient loss from the rain but also apply the nutrients when the crop needed it most. In the end yield was better on split applied nitrogen fields compared to fields that had all the N applied in the fall or spring before planting. #2 For the past 2 seasons in the North region, we have seen the benefits of adding NACHURS Humi-Flex FA to the in-furrow starter fertilizer. NACHURS Humi-Flex FA is our fulvic acid and it is becoming a valuable component in our starter fertilizer for many reasons. We are using it to chelate the nutrients in the starter fertilizer especially phosphorus. Humi-Flex FA also buffers the soil pH to neutral in that nutrient band keeping nutrients available in fields that have less then optimal pH for crop growth. Finally, we use Humi-Flex FA to create a healthy soil microbiome that leads to more root mass and nutrient uptake. #3 Nutrient uptake charts for corn and soybeans have been a great tool for our team to help our customers visualize the crops nutrient needs based on timing during the growing season.
