Producers who scrimped on nitrogen fertilizer for this year’s crops may want to revisit that decision in light of generally good growing conditions and some price improvements for canola and wheat.
“You can drive down the road and tell the crops now that are short of nitrogen,” said Garth MacDonald, co-owner and general manager of G-Mac’s AgTeam Inc., a crop input retailer in west-central Saskatchewan.
“If any producer didn’t put enough nutrients down with his crop to grow as much as the moisture will allow him, he could make himself money by top dressing liquid fertilizer now.”
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It appears nitrogen use on the Prairies may be down by as much as 10 percent from a year ago, said Rigas Karamanos of Westco.
Some producers struggled to get lines of credit, he said, and fertilizer sales were delayed by wet weather in areas such as northeastern Saskatchewan.
“The peak of fertilizer sales was happening a week or so later than what it normally does, and once that happens, it never catches up.”
The Canadian Fertilizer Institute could not confirm last week how much fertilizer has been sold for this year’s crops in comparison to previous years.
In Saskatchewan, there may have been small reductions, but they generally did not appear significant, said David Larsen, Saskatchewan Agriculture soil nutrient specialist. Seeding conditions were ideal across much of the province.
“The moisture was there and things looked good for good yields. That was in place and it was just a matter of providing the nutrients to take advantage of the moisture that was available.”
In southeastern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, nitrogen fertilizer use slid only a little bit, said Lyle DePauw, manager of agronomic services for AgPro of Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. That was despite talk this past winter that producers would try to cut their fertilizer costs, partly by switching to crops with lower nitrogen needs.
“From an agronomic point of view, we’ve been encouraging as many of our producers as we can to keep that nitrogen rate up. It is the only input that actually makes you money. Everything else just kind of protects your investment.”
On the eastern side of Manitoba, David Kelner saw an increase in soil testing as producers tried to more closely target nutrients to their crops’ needs.
And there were producers who switched out of crops with high nitrogen requirements after weighing input costs against the potential for profit.
“From our own retail network, we know canola acreage is down and oat acreage is up a little bit and flax acreage is up, and those are crops that generally don’t require as much nitrogen,” said Kelner, an agronomic specialist with Agricore United.
However, based on what he has seen, producers are fertilizing to reach their yield targets, rather than shorting their crops of nitrogen in a bid to save money.
“(Growers) know nitrogen is important and they’re not willing to short the crops and short the yield potential because that, at the end of the day, is the worst strategy,” Kelner said. “To leave out a critical component like that is just a recipe for disaster.”
MacDonald cautioned that a top dressing of liquid nitrogen fertilizer should be applied through stream nozzles rather than spray nozzles. There’s a risk of burning the crop if liquid nitrogen is sprayed in a foliar application.
