YORKTON, Sask. – With fertilizer prices still high, many farmers are thinking about reducing their fertilizer rate this spring.
But that would be a mistake, Viterra crop production specialist Thom Weir told the Prairie Oats Growers Association.
Spreading inputs thin doesn’t make sense and it would be better to farm fewer acres than farm all your acres poorly.
“Do the right thing on fewer acres,” said Weir at the Dec. 4 POGA convention.
Weir said farmers have been hit by plunging crop prices but fertilizer prices have not dropped at the same rate. That makes producers want to cut corners where they can.
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But Weir said fertilizer is not an area to cut because it is one of only four things that create yield and one of only two that farmers can control.
No one can control the amount of moisture that reaches the soil nor the amount of sunlight that bathes it, he said in an interview.
So the farmer’s key choices to maximize potential yield are seed variety and fertilizer.
All the other inputs such as herbicides and fungicides merely keep the potential intact.
“Those just protect yields,” he said.
If a farmer, because of a cash crunch, can’t afford to fertilize all of his acres at the recommended rate, he should consider cutting back acreage. Using 100 percent of the recommended inputs for 70 percent of a farmer’s acreage makes more sense than putting 70 percent of the fertilizer required on each acre.
That’s because each approach is likely to produce 70 percent of a potential crop, but the reduced-fertilizer approach has more variable costs.
Cutting the fertilizer rate doesn’t reduce the number of times the tractor has to cross the field, or the number of weed treatments required. So a farmer would end up with 100 percent of the fuel and crop protection costs with only 70 percent of a crop to pay for them.
By reducing acreage by 30 percent, all the other input bills will be reduced as well. Some fuel is burned by chem-fallowing, but not as much as with all the field actions required for growing a crop.
Weir said fertilizer costs have been falling in recent weeks, so he hopes no farmers get stuck making unpleasant fertilizer decisions.
But if they do, “you’ve got to look at the whole picture.”
