Feed grains specialist Pam de Rocquigny had three pieces of advice for producers planning next spring’s oat crop: soil test, soil test, soil test.
“You need to make sure you know what’s in your soil profile,” she said during the Prairie Oat Growers Association’s annual meeting in Winnipeg.
“It’s going to be more important than ever in 2006, when you have that rising fuel cost and rising fertilizer costs. Anywhere you can save money is important.”
The day before, during a meeting organized by the agronomy advice company Agri-Trend in Winnipeg, crop adviser Greg Patterson had a similar view.
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“Without a soil test, it’s a shot in the dark,” he said about picking input levels.
“You might create problems because you don’t have all the information. You might be creating problems needlessly.”
Farmers can cheat around the need for soil tests by applying lots of nitrogen, but there’s always a cost.
“In low fertility soils, you will get crop response by increasing nitrogen use,” Patterson said.
“You’re compensating for some deficiencies here and stimulating growth with nitrogen, but it’s not necessarily good quality growth.”
De Rocquigny said oat growers need to avoid excess nitrogen application because lodging is the main cause of yield loss in oats and lodging is increased greatly by excess nitrogen. A level of more than 100 pounds per acre is counterproductive.
Feed grain developer Brian Rossnagel of the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre said he’s begun studying whether farmers are starving their oat crops of sulfur.
Many producers like seeding oats immediately after a herbicide tolerant canola crop because of lower wild oat potential and low nitrogen levels, but many haven’t thought to check whether the canola crop has stripped most of the sulfur from the soil.
Some crops can do OK without sulfur, but not oats.
“You could put barley or wheat there and it would be fine,” said Rossnagel. “But oats will suffer.”
Even simple tests at the U of S showed big mid-season differences between soil that was supplemented with sulfur and soil that wasn’t. However, little difference was noted in the harvested crop, probably because Saskatoon soil has sufficient sulfur to carry a crop.
Rossnagel hopes growers and others in sulfur-deficient areas like Carrot River, Sask., watch for signs.
“We hope that if we’ve flagged something, the various agronomists who work with companies can keep an eye out for it.”
Patterson said farmers shouldn’t rely on simple soil tests that only tell them about a couple of nutrients. Simply measuring the nitrogen level and trying to manage that alone would not reveal an underlying problem, such as high calcium levels blocking other nutrients from being absorbed.
Around the world farmers are being pushed to use less nitrogen, so getting a better grasp of the full range of nutrients is worth a producer’s time and money.
“We can reduce nitrogen use by understanding all the elements that help the plant use nitrogen,” Patterson said.
