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[00:00:07] The Dirt PodKast:
Welcome to The Dirt, an economics podcast bringing you the down and dirty agronomic science behind growing better crops and bigger returns. Backed by nutrien-ekonomics.com, we break down the latest research, news, and insights to help farmers make better business decisions. Let’s dig in.
[00:00:31] Amy Crozier:
Hello and welcome back to the Dirt PodKast. Thank you for tuning in this week. I am your host, Amy Crozier, marketing representative with Nutrien in Canada. I’m excited to dig into today’s episode. Joining me today is Norm Dueck. We are going to cover the topic of nutrient management and the cost of overapplying or underapplying one specific nutrient. Norm is a longtime certified crop advisor and, as well, agronomist in Alberta and BC. He also works with A&L Labs. Thank you, Norm, for joining us today. And so why don’t we just start off, Norm. You can tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and where you’re from.
[00:01:10] Norm Dueck:
Thanks, Amy. It’s my pleasure to be here. We’ve met on a few occasions over the years and to be quite honest, actually, my first introduction to agronomy would’ve been back in the days when nutrient was known as Agrium. And there’s a couple of agronomists back then, Ray Dowbenko and Tom Jensen, who had a big influence in the start of my walk down this path. There’s a connection way back when I started. So that’s great. I live in central British Columbia, not perhaps the most innovative or most advanced farming area in western Canada, but we do a lot of good things around here. I do work a lot in the prairies, mostly northern Alberta, central Alberta, and then of course northern BC. Been a fun 27 plus years and looking forward to see what else can develop over the next few years and how we can get better at what we’re doing.
[00:01:52] Norm Dueck:
I love what I do. It’s been a passion of mine for many, many years. I worked in ag retail for 16 years from ’99 to 2015. And then in 2015, I started my own consulting business, HeartLand Soil and Crop Solutions. And at this very similar time, A&L Labs needed somebody to represent them in western Canada. So I was one of the first reps in western Canada for the lab, and it’s been a good learning process and a great journey for me from there.
[00:02:15] Amy Crozier:
Norm, with your clients and customers, and over the years, you’ve talked a lot about a balanced nutrient plan. How do you define a balanced nutrient plan? There’s lots of different strategies when it comes to nutrient planning, but from your perspective, what is a balanced nutrient plan?
[00:02:30] Norm Dueck:
That is a very broad question, but like you said, there are many different approaches to it. Mine always starts with a soil analysis. If you don’t know what’s in your soil, you’re starting off on the wrong foot already. You have to know what’s in your soil. You have to know what’s not there, but what might be in excess, what nutrients are at the right levels. It starts with the soil, and from there, there’s many different ways you can go about determining how to approach if you need to adjust to make a better fit for what your crop needs.
[00:02:55] Amy Crozier:
Why does that matter to soil fertility, crop production, and overall the bottom line on the farm?
[00:03:01] Norm Dueck:
It matters because farming is not a luxurious or lucrative industry as most of us know. We’re usually the people who end up taking what we can get, not determining what we want for our product. We have to be really careful. We have to know exactly or to the best possibilities, what are the options? How do we go about getting better at what we do? How can we improve our bottom line? And the soil, very basically put, is your bank account. If you don’t know what’s in your bank account, you’re going to start bouncing checks at some point and that’s never a good way to operate a business. You have to know what you got to start with to get a baseline, otherwise you’re grasping at straws that may or may not be there.
[00:03:40] Amy Crozier:
A lot of nutrient plans just focus on our macros, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. And farmers a lot of times too, when they look at a nutrient plan and say, “You know what? I’ve been doing this. This is working for me.” What other factors matter and why do we want to go beyond just our major macros and look at the soil and the whole production as a whole?
[00:04:00] Norm Dueck:
There’s a couple of things about that. First of all, what got me started on a journey digging deeper was I’d probably been at ag retail for about 10 years and I started getting more of very similar questions from growers saying, “Norm, we’ve been doing this for 10, 20, 30 years. We’re not getting the results anymore that we used to get in the past.” That’s what triggered me digging deeper, and that’s how I got involved with A&L. They were offering some excellent advice on that end. If you start digging deeper, then the micronutrients and the balances of the nutrients in the soil start mattering. We used to have, and we still have fairly virgin soils compared to a lot of places, whether it’s in the Midwest in the US or whether it’s in Europe, our soils are quite new, so to speak, even though we’ve pulled a lot out of them.
[00:04:38] Norm Dueck:
When you start with the fresh soil, you generally have good levels of micronutrients and often even your macros are okay. We’ve been getting away over the last number of decades with applying mostly nitrogen, some sulfur, and some phosphate because we had good supplies in our soil, a lot of the other nutrients. As time goes on, our crops are pulling out, we’re growing bigger crops, our crops are pulling more nutrients out. We have to start looking at a lot of the other factors that are becoming front and center now.
[00:05:04] Amy Crozier:
And what are some of those other factors that are becoming front and center?
[00:05:07] Norm Dueck:
I’m going to speak specifically to the areas I work in. In central BC, I’ve got the most experience here, and then of course, central and northern Alberta. 25 years ago when I came onto the scene, we were doing NPKS and boron in a lot of our soils. Our pH is averaged around, I would say 6.8 to 7.0 in central BC. Now we’re sitting at 5.8 to 6.0 on our pHs 25 years later. Boron is deficient almost everywhere. Zinc is low in many, many places. Copper is running very low. Manganese in some cases. There’s a whole bunch of nutrients that we’ve drawn down on for a long time and we have not been replacing them. Back in the day, now we’re talking years and years ago, we had what they call dirty fertilizers where the phosphate, let’s say the MAP or 11-52-0 came with some of the micronutrients in it, but then because of environmental reasons, we had to clean them up and we had to pull all these stuff out.
[00:05:55] Norm Dueck:
And then the industry took those other dirty products and sold them in a separate bag and farmers are like, “Well, we’ve never needed those, so we were not going to buy them.” We’ve basically sold ourselves short by not paying attention. But the micronutrients are a big one. Calcium pH is probably one of the biggest issues right now we’re facing in a lot of places across the west.
[00:06:14] Amy Crozier:
In today’s market, growers, we know fertilizer prices are high, input prices are high. Growers are sensitive to where they’re spending their dollar. And really some nutrients like nitrogen, we can see the impact right away. What is the long-term impact of focusing on one nutrient and spending on that one nutrient and ignoring the other nutrients in the long term? What’s the long-term cost overall to that farm?
[00:06:39] Norm Dueck:
Very good point. Nitrogen has been the easiest nutrient and the quickest one to see a return on. And still to this day, you apply, whatever, 50 or 100 pounds in, whatever your program is, you’re going to see an immediate response assuming we have some moisture in the soil. The long-term effect is the more nitrogen we put down and if we don’t also include whether it’s phosphate or potassium or sulfur or all the micros or calcium magnesium, the more nitrogen we put down, the faster we’re drawing down on the other nutrients as well. Obviously, the crop is bigger because it is a nitrogen response, but then it needs more of everything else. The long-term effect would be when you’re using excess nitrogen, for example, you are creating thin cell wall structure. Thin cell wall structure opens you up to diseases, to insects, to pests. They have easier access to the plants.
[00:07:23] Norm Dueck:
So that’s probably one of the bigger impacts is the health of the crop. It has lots of nitrogen. Sometimes the crop has to work hard to flush some of the excess nitrogen because it has too much, doesn’t know what to do with it. For instance, typically in your cereals, for example, for every pound of nitrogen that your crop needs, it also needs a pound of potassium throughout the growing season. But we’re not supplying them for the most part. Potassium plays over 60 key roles in plant health, plant structure. And if you’re not supplying it, you’re going backwards on the other end of it with low drought tolerance, low flooding tolerance, low disease resistance when you’re not taking care of potassium, for example.
[00:07:58] Amy Crozier:
In your experience, especially in today’s climate, where do you see farmers get off-track with their fertilizer rates?
[00:08:04] Norm Dueck:
This is a tough climate to be in. And for us, especially here in BC, we’re extremely dry. It’s one thing to have a balanced fertility program and that’s fairly easy to do from a scientific perspective. You can say, “Well, I’m missing this in the soil. I have too much of that, so we’re going to apply X, Y, Z.” And then technically on paper, you have a balanced approach. But the economics always trump what guys are going to do. We tend to reach for the easy one in the cupboard and often it’s nitrogen and sulfur. And that’s where we get caught short is we don’t recognize the value of using potassium, using boron, using copper in your crop. And then we end up with all these other deficiencies potentially where we’re opening ourselves up to other risks by only providing the easy, accessible nutrient that gives you the fastest response visually.
[00:08:54] Norm Dueck:
Adding potassium, you won’t necessarily see it visually right away, but it’s in the roots. It’s the root structure, it’s root growth. It’s all these things that you don’t necessarily see. Whereas nitrogen, you apply it, boom, you see it in five days if you get moisture, there’s your response.
[00:09:06] Amy Crozier:
That’s a really good point. And lots of times when we talk about a balanced nutrient approach, we talk about Liebig’s law where it’s addressing the scarce nutrient is going to be the one that’s going to impact yield. What’s the impact if you just dress one? For example, we’ve talked about nitrogen a lot and we don’t have that balanced approach. What’s the impact?
[00:09:23] Norm Dueck:
Well, I’ll give you one example. I’m not anti-nitrogen or synthetics or anything. A colleague of mine had an experience in a field in Alberta where he had recommended to put one pound of boron on a section of canola divided into four separate fields, four quarters, 640 acres of canola. And the retailer obviously goofed on that one, made a mistake and they didn’t put the boron on the first three quarters of that section. To make up for their mistake and hopefully not get caught, they put all the boron on the last quarter section. So instead of getting one pound of actual, that last quarter, got four pounds of actual boron. Now, most people freak out when you hear that. So the leaf tips turned white for a little bit. This was a canola crop that’s sensitive to too much boron. It did turn white for a bit, but with enough moisture, the crop was able to metabolize it.
[00:10:09] Norm Dueck:
Come that July when the lygus bugs are usually in season, they came through and they decimated the three quarters that didn’t have boron, but they left the other quarter section alone, what had adequate or actually some excess boron. And the reason being, boron moves sugars in the plants. If you don’t have enough boron, when our long days and short nights, at night the plants are supposed to dump the sugars, so to speak for lack of a better term, into the root system where the biology takes it, eats it up, spits it out, feeds it back to the plant and in the morning when the sun comes up, that goes back up the plant.
[00:10:39] Norm Dueck:
Now, if the plant can’t dump the boron at night, it stays in the leaves, which means the sugars aren’t flowing down to the roots. So now you have excess sugars trapped in the leaf material, which attracts sucking insects like the lygus bug. So that’s a prime example of what it can do if you don’t have enough boron, in this case, in your crop.
[00:10:57] Amy Crozier:
What you’re leading to, Norm, is that balanced nutrient management just isn’t about yield. It’s also about disease resistance, attracting those bugs, and overall plant health quality. I’ve also seen where it also plays a big role in especially potassium and phosphorus and your maturity as well. We have a Mulder chart. There’s lots of resources that farmers are familiar with. Liebig’s law is one of them. The Mulder chart of how those plants, those nutrients interact. Can you tell us a little bit about how a balanced approach and those nutrients working with each other matters to the overall quality of that crop?
[00:11:32] Norm Dueck:
Yeah, that gets fairly complicated, but the Mulder chart is one that I go to a fair bit. Give you example of, well, let’s say phosphate and zinc. They work together really well. Typically, you want a 10 to 1 ratio between those two because they work together well. Now, if you have phosphate, but you have a high aluminum soil, now all of a sudden your aluminum will tie up the phosphate and aluminum grabs whatever phosphate it can, ties it up, and it’s no longer crop available. In that case, what you can do is if you have high aluminum, you’re adding phosphate, but you’re not getting the response. Well, you can apply some gypsum, for example, in furrow and the gypsum has a positive impact and it will actually release the phosphate back to that crop. The calcium sulfate being gypsum is, in some ways, a bit of a magical product. Doesn’t do everything, but it sure works great in releasing some nutrients.
[00:12:16] Norm Dueck:
There’s factors like that. Potassium helps the plant. Actually, it stabilizes nitrogen. If we’re having issues with drought, and in our case here, we’re doing a lot of broadcast nitrogen and you don’t get the rain, you’ve got a problem. But if you add potassium to that, the KCL will actually stabilize the nitrogen in the soil. Or you add sulfur, which ironically sulfur is the one nutrient that is not on the Mulder chart because it does not interfere with any other nutrients. But it will help plants utilize nitrogen more efficiency. That’s why the nitrogen to sulfur 10 to 1 ratio is very effective and important to maintain.
[00:12:47] Amy Crozier:
You bring up interesting points about how nutrients interact each other and how they benefit overall plant health. When you’re making a fertility plan, we talk about nutrient removal, uptake, how do you go about developing a fertilizer fertility plan?
[00:13:02] Norm Dueck:
There again, that can get very in-depth or basic depending on what your grower wants and depending on what he has to begin with. Obviously, everything is based on soil analysis, so that’s the first thing I go to. I go to what you have in your cupboard, so to speak. I can take into consideration your yields from previous years. But the nutrient balances, your K-Mag ratio is a huge one. For example, if you have a high magnesium, if your magnesium in the soil is over 20% base saturation, your plants are likely not getting enough. You have a case where you have an excess amount of magnesium, but you very likely have a deficient plant because when the plant sees more than 20% base saturation of magnesium, it basically shuts the door and says, “I’m not taking any in.” In that case, one of the tricks there is you can actually apply very soluble form of magnesium, for example, like K-Mag and you can trick the plant to open up and take it in again with a very soluble form.
[00:13:48] Norm Dueck:
There’s ways of doing that, but there’s so many factors. Organic matter. Nitrogen is one of our probably most misused nutrients at the same time while it’s the most important one, probably, or the most effective one. It’s also in the atmosphere. We have nitrogen fixing bacteria in the soil. It’s not necessarily just legumes that produce nitrogen. Considering the possibilities of the nitrogen that can come off from your organic matter in the soil or from the atmosphere, that one we could probably benefit most by actually looking after some of the other nutrients to make sure your plant is running on all cylinders.
[00:14:19] Norm Dueck:
And then we can reduce not what the nitrogen that the plant needs, but we can possibly reduce the amount that we have to put down because we’re looking after the other nutrients. And maybe a bit of a side trail here, but one of the reasons we don’t often do that is because, and this might sound a bit bad towards ag retailers, but in a lot of cases, ag retailers are a little bit afraid to take that step that they’re not familiar with.
[00:14:42] Norm Dueck:
And they also have the impression that if a farmer, a grower understands too much of their soils, they may end up cutting back on their nitrogen use. But I can almost guarantee you every farmer that’s ever cut back on nitrogen use because they had a proper plan will take those dollars and put them in another nutrient because they know now they freed up some dollars and they can actually look after some of the other facets. So that’s a bit of a rabbit trail. I think retailers have a bit of a misconception in a lot of cases of what farmers will do with more knowledge. I think it’s actually works out positive for everybody around when the more we know, the better understanding we have. We’re going to grab for the nutrients that matter most and everybody in that loop will benefit from that.
[00:15:22] Amy Crozier:
What we’re really talking about here is the overapplying of one nutrient and how that knocks everything out of balance and how it’s not efficient and how that can cost us. At the end of the day, on the bottom line of the dollars that we’re spending, they’re not the best use for our crop because it’s not about cutting back, it’s about doing things right. We talk about tools, about soil fertility, cropping rotations, how do those impact your overall plan? And what tools are really beneficial to making a good nutrient management plan?
[00:15:49] Norm Dueck:
Obviously crop rotations play big into it because we’re talking disease and insect issues, pests. Crop rotations are big. How to do up a plan. There’s so many factors involved here. Every farm is unique. Every soil is unique. I think one of the keys, and we’re moving into this more in the prairies than we are here in central BC yet because we’re a smaller farm area, but not just knowing what your average soil is, knowing the variability in your fields and your soil, because you can have a pH of 5.2 in one spot and 7.2, 200 meters away. I think then this will become more essential in the future as we develop our programs better is that we start looking at every area of your field. Whatever in-depth mapping you have to use, whether it’s SoilOptix or whether it’s Veris or whether it’s site-specific or SWAT MAPS, there’s a whole bunch of different ways that we can find out or we can map the variability within our soil.
[00:16:37] Norm Dueck:
I’ll give you an example on my field. I’ve got a quarter section at home. I lease it to another farmer, but I play around with the soil a lot. And I used to do a very aggressive fertility program and still do. But as an example, I would do on the 85 acres, I put roughly 100 pounds of MAP down every single year as a blanket. First of all, I did site specifically at a one acre grid where I sampled every acre on 85 acres and that’s a very expensive way to go for a large farm operation. And then I did a couple of years later, I went and did SoilOptix, digital mapping, and both were highlighting pretty much the same thing. So it turned out I needed, instead of using a 100 pounds per acre blanket MAP on my field, I only needed 50 pounds. But some areas needed 100 pounds, 150, some didn’t need any.
[00:17:15] Norm Dueck:
About 25% of my field did not need any phosphate. I was putting money and phosphate where I did not need it and probably wouldn’t need it for 30, 40, 50 years because, for example, one area was an old haystack yard. Huge levels of phosphate there and potassium. One of the keys to develop a proper soil nutrient plant is going to be to not just know the composite or the average of your field, but you’re going to have to start digging down and using the technology we have and figure out where in the field you need to spend phosphate dollars. Where do you need nitrogen? Where do you need sulfur? Where are you going to get the best return on each of those nutrients? And it’s a bit overwhelming for farmers who have not gone down this road. But I can assure growers out there, there is people like myself, there’s companies like A&L Labs, there’s a ton of companies out there who can make this really easy for you.
[00:18:02] Norm Dueck:
All you need to make sure is that they have proper soil data and the rest is get the professionals in there. They will set the scripts for you. They’ll send you a file at the end of the day. You plug it into your machine and you go. And the machine knows what to do. And maybe I’m making it sound a little bit too easy, but it’s not as hard or complicated as what most farmers who haven’t done it think it might be.
[00:18:21] Amy Crozier:
I know this can sound pretty complex to a farmer that’s not familiar with a lot of technology. Some of the younger generations are very familiar with it. When we’re talking about for our nutrient plan, not overapplying or underapplying certain nutrients, what’s the ROI that you have seen that farms have been able to benefit from?
[00:18:38] Norm Dueck:
The big thing on the ROI is, again, there’s so many variables here too where you don’t know what your crops are going to be worth when you actually harvest them. And this puts farmers at a high risk position where you’re assuming or you’re hoping. And probably the biggest issue there is you can’t fire all your bullets in one shot. And the further north you go, you up the piece, that risk is even higher. You misfire on the first shot, that was your only shot. There is a balance between, I’m always going to push for aggressive fertility because I see what the science says. Part of what I do is always, okay, so here’s what I would like you to do. Now you need to tell me, given this situation in the market today, what’s the risk you can take? What are you willing to take for a risk?
[00:19:17] Norm Dueck:
There are certain things that I can say, “Well, if you have $100 per acre to spend, the biggest thing I can do is I can direct you to where I would spend those dollars where you’re going to see the most likely return.” The ROI is never a perfect picture. It’s never, “Well, if you do this, you’re going to get that.” It’s always, “Here’s the dollars we have available. Here’s your products your soil needs. Three out of these five products are going to give you a better return. Let’s figure out where we put the dollars.” And a lot of that, obviously a soil sample, but the more in-depth you do that, the mapping, the digital mapping, know where you need it, that’s going to be your best bet on return on investment.
[00:19:50] Amy Crozier:
I think it really goes back. We’re talking about the soil bank and the importance of one of the things about having a balanced nutrient plan is having a soil that can support a crop over time. And that we’re investing in that soil bank and that we’re not taking out more nutrients than we’re putting in and we’re managing that balance. I think that’s really important to an ROI.
[00:20:11] Amy Crozier:
When we’re looking at a balanced nutrient plan, what advice do you have to our listeners? I know you mentioned we have one shot to get things right and then that may be in one year. But over time when you’re developing a long-term rotation, a long-term plan, what advice would you have to the listeners to where do they start? What can they do? And what does that look like for the longevity?
[00:20:31] Amy Crozier:
We’re not looking about farming for today, we’re going to do it tomorrow. That’s always the saying on the farm, when something goes wrong. We’re not just doing this today, we’re going to keep on going and we’re going to do it again tomorrow. What changes can we make?
[00:20:41] Norm Dueck:
That’s a very good point. And you’re right. What I meant was that it’s a one shot per season usually in our northern cold climates. What I do a fair bit with my guys is I implement a plant tissue program as well. Because you can put all your products out there and if you really want to know whether the plants are getting what you’re applying, you need to do a plant tissue program. And again, toot A&L’s horn here, but we have an amazing plant monitoring program where you pull tissue samples once every week or 10 days from the same location and the same crop over the course of growing season, three, four, or five samples in a row from four-leaf stage up to flag or a bit beyond. That shows you it’s a report card. And typically there are cases where you can use a plant monitoring program to save this year’s crop, but often I use that data to adjust next year’s program.
[00:21:26] Norm Dueck:
It is a long-term program. It isn’t just this year. You’re farming for your kids, you’re farming for your grandkids and you want to set them up as well as you can. And there are some farmers who have the ability or the understanding or the drive to really buckle down and let’s figure out what we need to do different next year. I’ve got guys in the field that I work with, even yesterday was out scouting with one of my guys and he’s a dairyman, and he’s already planning about next year, what could we do differently next year? What could we do better? The long-term approach is we need to look after today to grow the best crop that you can that’ll bring you an ROI this year because if you don’t do that, you’re not going to be here next year or five years. Can only lose so many years in a row.
[00:22:02] Norm Dueck:
We have to plan this year, but we have to have a long-term approach where you’re looking at what are your kids going to do? The person that’s going to buy your farm off you, what are they left with? It’s a long-term game. It’s a generational game. It’s not a one-year. So the long-term is learn what we can this year to improve next year.
[00:22:17] Amy Crozier:
For our last question and takeaway for our listeners, what strategies, key points do you want to leave with them for making a balanced nutrient plan so you’re not over or underapplying one nutrient?
[00:22:30] Norm Dueck:
This is maybe more applicable to some of the larger farmers. But as a farmer, you have so many things going on. The technology, there’s so many pivotal points that you as a farmer have to make a decision on. And there’s a lot of good independent agronomists out there. There’s hundreds of them in western Canada. And what I’ve observed and also had the feedback from guys that I work with is that, to have an unbiased opinion available at your fingertips, whether it’s a quick text or a quick phone call or it’s an email, I believe the return, another good ROI or a good way to ensure or maybe improve your ROI is to have somebody available who can walk you through some of the difficult decisions you have to make. As the farmer, you still have to make that final decision. You’re the one with a check, you’re the money, you write the check, so you make the decision.
[00:23:14] Norm Dueck:
But if you can have a professional and experienced person beside you to hold your hand and make some of those key indicators more obvious early on can save you large in the long run. I believe one of the keys is an independent agronomist on your short call list that you can work with. As an independent agronomist, I can advise my clients, “You know what? I know these guys over here in whatever town they have this product on hand.” It gets more complicated at times. It can be tricky to work with, but find somebody who will give you advice that’s for your own good more so than for the good of the, whether it’s a retailer, whoever’s selling you the product. And if you can find a true independent agronomist who does not sell fertilizers, that’s worth a fair bit.
[00:23:54] Amy Crozier:
No, it’s a very good point. We’ve talked about the four Rs, the importance of soil testing, the importance of balance, the importance of Liebig’s law, of just not distressing one nutrient, not the other. Is there anything else that you want to add, a last takeaway, for our listeners or something that we didn’t cover?
[00:24:14] Norm Dueck:
In BC, there’s a political side to it as well that I don’t like to get into politics too much, but this can impact anybody whether your province has regulations around this or not. But as a farmer, doing due diligence, knowing what you’re working with, knowing what you have but you don’t have, and keeping records. The keeping record thing is, of course, in BC, it’s mandatory. Not that there’s any policing of it necessarily, but there’s mandatory records you have to keep and that’s called due diligence. But it also plays a very important role as a grower. If you do know what you did three years ago or 10 years ago, you can make better decisions today. I would say recordkeeping. Know what you’ve done, make better plans because you know what you did last year. I can’t say that enough. Keep records, keep records, write things down that’ll help you make better decisions.
[00:24:56] Amy Crozier:
Awesome. That’s a great point, Norm. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to spend with us today. It was very insightful. I enjoyed the conversation. If our listeners, if they want to check out more about what we talked about today, please check out nutrien-ekonomics with a k.com and thank you for tuning in today.
[00:25:14] The Dirt PodKast:
Farming isn’t farming without questions and now there’s a place to go for answers. At eKonomics, an entire team of agronomists are ready and waiting to help for free. No question is too big or too small. Visit nutrien-ekonomics with a k.com and submit your question with the ask an agronomist feature.
[00:25:37] The Dirt PodKast:
What does a sulfur deficiency look like?
[00:25:40] Alan Blaylock:
Sulfur deficiency is usually manifest as a yellowing of the upper leaves on the plant. Because sulfur is not mobile in the plant, the deficiencies tend to show up on the newest growth. As the older leaves are forming, some sulfur gets incorporated and if the plant becomes deficient, then we’ll see those symptoms manifest on the youngest leaves. In contrast to nitrogen, which is very mobile in the plant, the plant will scavenge or cannibalize nitrogen in the older leaves and move it to the newer tissue.
[00:26:10] Alan Blaylock:
Where sulfur is immobile, the plant doesn’t do that. We see the symptoms on the youngest leaves. Sometimes in more severe cases, we might see that deficiency manifest throughout the plant, but we look first at the younger leaves. And sometimes it will be a bit of a striping, like on corn or some of the other grasses, we may see some striping along with that yellowing. But often it’s just a general lighter green or yellow green leaf color, sometimes but not always accompanied by some striping.
[00:26:41] The Dirt PodKast:
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