Read Full Transcript:
Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by eKonomics.com, farming’s go-to informational resource, I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research, use and issues. Helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:38):
Well, hello again, everyone. Welcome back to The Dirt. We’re nearing the end of season two of The Dirt. It’s hard to believe that we have been doing this for almost two years now. We’ve got a familiar guest back with us. We’ve got Lyle Cowell. Lyle is our senior agronomist in Canada, and we’re going to be talking a little bit about some of the micronutrients that we started talking about in season one and never quite finished up. We’ve got two nutrients that we still need to cover and Lyle has agreed to cover both of those with us today. Before we get started, Lyle, appreciate you being here. I know the weather is starting to change a little bit. Do y’all have any snow on the ground up that way yet?
Lyle Cowell (01:13):
There was a dusting of snow this morning on the ground and a little bit more in the forecast and temperatures are starting to plummet. We had an exceptionally warm fall this year, but we’re looking at some days that it won’t get above zero Celsius.
Mike Howell (01:27):
Well, we had quite a warm fall as well. I believe it’s 92 degrees outside right now, and that’s just unheard of here in late October, 1st of November. Doesn’t seem like summer’s ever going to get away from us down here, but it’ll turn cold one day. Then it’ll be warm again the next, so that’s life in the South.
Lyle Cowell (01:44):
A few minutes you’ll be complaining it’s too wet.
Mike Howell (01:47):
Yeah, you won’t hear me complaining for a while on that one. We still haven’t had a good rain. Lyle, let’s go ahead and get started on today’s episode. Today we wanted to talk about copper and manganese, so let’s start off and talk about copper first. We know it’s one of our essential plant nutrients. It’s a micronutrient, but what is the role of copper inside the plant?
Lyle Cowell (02:08):
Well, Mike, when you look at micronutrients, it gets complicated. All nutrients have multiple roles, but a lot of micronutrients have enzymatic roles and copper and manganese have some similarities in that way. Manganese has a role in enzymatic activation, has a role directly within photosynthesis, just a lot of different roles within the planet. It’s almost hard to sort out which one’s which.
Mike Howell (02:31):
Both of these are going to be doing pretty much the same function within the plant.
Lyle Cowell (02:35):
One key thing with copper is that it has a very important role in the development and survival of pollen. That becomes pretty critical because without successful pollen development, there’s no seed. Sometimes we see very severe deficiencies with copper because of that effect in pollen formation.
Mike Howell (02:53):
I’ll have to say neither of these two nutrients are something I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on over my career. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a deficiency in either one of these. Let’s talk a little bit about, one thing we always want to touch on when we’re talking about nutrients is are they mobile in the soil and are they mobile within the plants? What about these two nutrients? Are they mobile in the soil? Are they mobile in the plant?
Lyle Cowell (03:14):
Well, again, they have some similarities. They’re both cations. They both have a positive charge, so they’re going to be attracted to clay and organic matter, so not very mobile in the soil. Manganese does have more mobility than copper would have in the soil. However, the deficiencies in manganese and copper often do occur in low cation soils, sandy soils. Within the plant, both of them have fairly limited mobility within the plant, and so we tend to see symptoms that develop quite severely on the newest tissue because of that. Even some of the deficiency symptoms are somewhat similar between the two, both leading to some level of chlorosis and necrosis. Both of them could be, for example, easily mistaken for the effect of drought or potassium deficiency, that browning necrosis of leaves, and so we start to see some similarities between the two even in deficiency symptoms.
Mike Howell (04:08):
Okay. It’s really hard to tell visually what’s going on if we may have a deficiency with these two. How can somebody know for sure if they have a deficiency?
Lyle Cowell (04:17):
Well, there’s a certain amount of piecing things together with both of them. If you understand first of all what the soil background is, what type of soil it is, the symptoms themselves with individual crop species and the susceptibility of different species to the deficiency can have some impact. They start to look at which crop is it, is it likely to be a crop species that’s sensitive to this deficiency and is the soil likely to be deficient in that particular nutrient? For example, putting the pieces together. Copper is quite an important nutrient in terms of wheat pollen fertility. Wheat is a very sensitive crop to copper deficiency. If you have wheat and you have poor seed formation, you have necrosis of the leaves, it’s a very sandy soil, that is a possibility of copper deficiency. When it comes right down to it, though, the number one thing that I tend to do when I’m at a field and I’m not sure, is to try find good plants and bad plants and then do comparative tissue tests.
(05:17):
There’s one thing about micronutrient deficiency in all cases that it tends to be extremely variable. Within a given field you’ll usually find areas that are actually doing quite well, quite near plants that are doing really badly, so a comparative tissue test can be a really great tool to compare which nutrient it is that’s being affected. You can take this a little bit more towards a farming answer to sorting out what is wrong too, by simply applying some fertilizer. Apply some foliar fertilizer to a crop that’s doing badly. If you think it’s copper deficient, apply some foliar copper fertilizer. See if you get a response. The plants will tell you if that’s the problem.
Mike Howell (05:53):
Lyle, you mentioned something there that’s pretty common on a lot of these micronutrients. You mentioned that it’s very isolated. One plant may show symptoms and the neighboring plant may not have those symptoms, and that’s pretty common. I’m assuming that’s just because these nutrients are required in such low amounts and if we run into fertilizing for these nutrients, it’s really hard to get uniform application because we’re looking at such small amounts. You may get a little bit more here and not as much close to it. Is that what’s going on in these situations?
Lyle Cowell (06:21):
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a few things that come into play. With nitrogen responses, for example, we tend to see a wide range of response. As you add 20 or 40, 60, 80 increasing rates within, you see a bigger and bigger response within. The response curve on copper and manganese and the case with most micronutrients tends to be a bit of a cliff. You have plants that either have sufficient copper or manganese or are very deficient. And the range of availability between, it’s a very tight band. Within a field, because of this, you can see huge differences in deficiency symptoms. And as you said, this comes to then the question, how do we deal with it? We’re not only requiring small amounts of micronutrients, but we’re then going to be applying very small amounts of micronutrients and trying to apply them uniformly on the field is difficult. Probably some of the success, [inaudible 00:07:14] your application, you can get a quick response and you can get a fairly uniform application.
(07:20):
Sometimes the timing can be a bit tricky, but it is a nice way of applying them. The other problem that we see is that you think we want uniformity, so let’s broadcast the copper or manganese, and that actually tends to work against us because copper and manganese tends to be quite reactive with soil constituents and will quickly be tied up, so it’s actually better to put it in the soil. If you’re putting it in the soil, put it in a band with other fertilizers. It helps prevent the amount that’s being tied up by the soil, and if you’re putting it in a band with say, ammonium phosphate or ammonium sulfate or some urea which are acid forming, that’ll actually improve the availability of those micronutrients because they become more available at a lower pH.
Mike Howell (08:02):
Great information there, Lyle. We’ve kind of beat around this topic a little bit already, but what are some fertilizer sources for these two nutrients? If somebody realizes they have a copper deficiency or a manganese deficiency, what fertilizers can they go look for to correct that?
Lyle Cowell (08:19):
First piece of advice I always give an agronomist is, if you think you have a copper deficiency or a manganese deficiency, then apply a copper fertilizer. Don’t try to utilize products that will apply many different nutrients, but not sufficient amount of any one of those nutrients. Within the micronutrient market there is a lot of products. They can be generally broken down into types, though. Take something like copper. Well, traditionally we’ve used a lot of copper sulfate. There’s copper sulfate products available in the marketplace right now for both soil and foliar application. They work well. They don’t work well for all applicators. It’s a good product depending on how you’re applying them. There’s copper oxides that have relatively low solubility, but they’re easy to apply. Copper oxides applied at a relatively high rate of copper compared to other products over time can build up your copper in the soil. And then like I say, there’s a number of chelated products, both for soil application and for foliar application, and those can work very well too.
Mike Howell (09:23):
Well, Lyle, we spent a good bit of time waiting to cover these two micronutrients and there’s just not a whole lot to talk about on these two. I think you did a great job giving us the essential information we needed to know about these, but these two nutrients are just not as critical as some of the others that we spent more time talking about in earlier episodes. Lyle, is there any take home message you want to leave our growers with before we wrap this one up?
Lyle Cowell (09:48):
Well, you said it right, Mike, they’re micronutrients, they’re required at small amounts. In the end, they’re also not required in all that large of a geography, and I think it’s just important that people are aware of what their local requirements for micronutrients are in terms of the crops that grow and the soils that they grow them in. Sitting here up in Saskatchewan in Canada, the micronutrient that I think of first is copper for wheat. But I think that we have to just take a step back and understand which crop you’re growing and which are the most likely soil and crop combinations that are going to lead to a micronutrient, and then understand where in the cropping rotations and where on the farms that those responses are most likely to occur. We can make good headway just by understanding those two factors. It’s kind of the crop times by soil equation to make sure that we’re doing the right thing.
Mike Howell (10:39):
Well, Lyle, we appreciate you taking time out to visit with us today and listeners, as you know, now is the time where we move in and talk about somebody famous in agriculture. Being as Lyle is our Canadian agronomist, I thought it would be appropriate that we talked about somebody from Canada. Today we’re going to talk about Mr. Charles Balmer. Charles was an immigrant from Switzerland and he moved to Manitoba, Canada. He’s known for his work on the high clearance self-propelled sprayers and variable rate technology. From 1953 to 1977, Charlie worked as a ag mechanic for Elie Motors and they were a J.I. Case dealer.
(11:19):
Here his talent and passion for the equipment industry blossomed, and one day he had a customer that came into the store and had a problem with a new combine. Charlie was able to identify the problem and create a solution to that problem because of an engineering fault from the manufacturer. And in 1955, the J.I. Case Company actually hired him to develop similar retrofit kits for 200 combines across Canada. Charlie also had a passion for flying, and in 1961 he acquired his pilot’s license and became one of Manitoba’s pioneer aerial applicators.
(11:54):
He established a Elie air spray company. It was a custom ground and aerial application company serving Elie area farmers for over 20 years. Now, Monsanto heard about Charlie and his developments and asked him to work on a metering system for aerial application of a granular, Avadex. He found that this was not going to be possible because of some of the properties, so he instead designed a metering system attachment for high flotation ground applicators. In 1977, Charlie founded Belmar Manufacturing and built the new Avadex machines.
(12:30):
It was here that he really became absorbed in equipment design, and he had several inventions over the next few years. He designed and developed the Valmar Airflo Granular Applicator that featured precise metering and product placement. He developed the Loral Air Spreader and the AirMax boom spreaders, and he also developed the Willmar AirRide self-propelled sprayer, which was one of the first high clearance self-propelled sprayers designed and built in North America.
(12:58):
In 2004, he was inducted into the Manitoba Agriculture Hall of Fame, and in 2007, he was inducted into the Canadian Agriculture Hall of Fame. Charlie worked his entire career working with different machines. I understand that he worked right up until the day that he died with new developments. One of his inventions that he never got to finish was a hovercraft that was designed to spray in wet conditions. When I was in graduate school, my major professor came to me soon after I started and wanted me to go find a hovercraft. He thought that would be great for making insecticide applications early in the spring when it was too wet to get a ground machine in there, and I thought he was crazy, and when I looked up the price of a hovercraft, I really thought he was crazy. But needless to say, we never did buy a hovercraft to spray research plots, but Charlie was definitely well above his years in terms of his inventions, and most of his inventions are still being used today.
(13:51):
So we want to take time and thank Charlie for all of his contributions to agriculture. Now, listeners, if you need more information on anything we’ve talked about today, you can always visit our website. That’s nutrient-eKonomics with a K, dot com. And until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
