In 2005, Alberta winter wheat plots in which all nitrogen fertilizer was placed with the seed as environmentally sensitive nitrogen had an average yield slightly more than six bushels per acre over plots fertilized with conventional urea fertilizer.
The study, comparing commercial ESN to straight urea, was conducted by Ross McKenzie with Alberta Agriculture in Lethbridge, who placed one plot in the brown soil zone, one plot in the dark brown soil zone and one plot in the thick black zone.
The 2005 yield benefit was the highest so far in the ongoing study. In 2003, ESN showed an average benefit over straight urea of 3.5 bu. per acre. In 2004, the ESN benefit was just over two bu. per acre.
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“At a six bu. per acre increase, I’d have to say ESN makes money for the grower,” McKenzie said.
“I’m not sure it pays with a 3.5 bu. increase, and of course it’s more questionable with a two bu. increase.”
Using rough figures, McKenzie said that if a producer uses urea to put down 60 pounds of nitrogen, and ESN is factored at a dime a lb., that’s an added cost of $6 per acre if the producer wants the poly protection.
“If you get an extra six bu. of grain and you can sell at $4 per bu., then you’ve picked up $24 per acre for an investment of only $6 per acre. That’s a good deal.”
McKenzie said the economic benefit of ESN begins to disappear as grain prices and yield benefits go down.
“In my mind, I always like to see a $2 payback for every $1 invested in fertilizer products. So our first economic question is how many extra bushels we need to justify the extra money you have to spend.”
McKenzie said yield is not the only
consideration in trying to make a profit.
“The big deal in my opinion is that we have found you can put all that high rate nitrogen fertilizer down into the ground with winter wheat and not risk injury to the plants through the germination and emergence process.”
It eliminates the need to broadcast nitrogen in the spring, allowing a producer to focus all his attention on spring seeding and let the winter wheat take care of itself.
“The other economic factor is protein. If you can control the time of the nitrogen release in winter wheat, you should be able to create a protein kick,” McKenzie said.
“The N would have to be released right at the time of heading. All of our N went down in September when we seeded, so I think it was all released before heading and it went into vegetative growth instead of protein.”
He said it should not be a big challenge to change the time-release mechanism of the polymer coating so some nitrogen is released at heading.
Scientists often push their research to the limit because finding a product’s breaking point is the only way to know how good it is. McKenzie thought he was doing just that when he applied 80 lb. per acre of ESN with the winter wheat seed, which should have been enough seed-placed nitrogen to cause a wreck.
“There was no germination problem and no emergence problem with poly coated urea at 90 kilograms per hectare or 80 lb. per acre,” he said.
“In all of our winter wheat work up until now, we could never put more than 30 lb. per acre of urea nitrogen with the seed. If you go over 30 lb., with a 10 percent seed bed utilization, you run considerable risk of crop damage and reduced plant populations going into winter. We saw no crop damage with ESN at 80 lb.
“Agrium doesn’t want to talk much about this until they have more actual field documentation, but if it works this well, it has all kinds of potential for one-pass seeding. Not just winter wheat, but all kinds of crops.”
McKenzie said that as one step in this direction, he is beginning a more intensive study of ESN on spring-seeded barely.
