Knowing how much fertilizer to apply in the spring when growing malting barley can be a challenge. It’s hard to target nutrients, particularly nitrogen, to how much rain might fall during the growing season.
It’s a challenge that Blake Nestibo, a top malting barley grower in Manitoba, struggles with every year.
“The best time to ask me how much fertilizer to apply is in the fall after I’ve harvested the crop,” he said during a malting barley seminar held by the Canadian Wheat Board in Brandon Jan. 8.
Read Also
Government, industry seek canola tariff resolution
Governments and industry continue to discuss how best to deal with Chinese tariffs on Canadian agricultural products, particularly canola.
Nestibo was chosen top malting barley producer in Manitoba in 2002 in a competition organized by malt selectors and the wheat board. The Goodlands farmer said one of his main strategies is to plant the crop on land where sunflowers were grown the year before.
Sunflowers take a lot of nitrogen out of the soil, Nestibo said, leaving little nitrogen residue compared to flax and canola.
For Nestibo, there’s an advantage in that. It lowers the variability in nutrients that can be caused by re-sidual nitrogen during the growing season, helping him to more closely target how much nitrogen to apply at planting.
He noted that crops planted the year after sunflowers tend to have lower yields and protein. The lower protein helps his barley stay in the malt selection range, and the malting premiums compensate for the slight drop in yields.
“I’ve been using that rotation for at least five years. It’s a continual thing I’ve found with the sunflower ground.”
Nestibo farms in an area where dry weather tends to prevail during the growing season.
He likes to plant his malting barley as early in the year as possible, usually before the end of April. The sunflowers also help there, because fields with sunflower stubble are blacker than those with canola or cereal stubble. That helps trap heat, warming the soil more quickly in the spring and supporting the crop’s early establishment.
Nestibo finds the sunflower rotation also helps manage disease, including fusarium head blight. Fusarium can lead to mycotoxins in barley kernels, which can result in their rejection for malting.
The risk of high protein in malting barley crops tends to be higher in areas with limited moisture. Mike Grenier, a wheat board agronomist, said dry weather in recent years, especially in Saskatchewan and Alberta, has led to increasing levels of residual nitrogen in prairie fields.
There is still no exact science to help producers know how much residual nitrogen will be tied up in the soil or made available to the crop.
However, Grenier said it is important to think about that nitrogen and how it may be influenced by factors such as manure applications and crop residue from previous crops.
Legumes, with their nitrogen-fixing ability, should also be taken into account if included in the rotation before planting malting barley.
While producers do not want to overapply nitrogen and risk protein levels, they also do not want to end up depriving the crop of nutrients and suffering yield losses.
Grenier said soil testing remains an important tool for managing that.
