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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-economics.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. Thank you for tuning in this week. I am your host, Amy Crozier, senior marketing representative with Nutrien. I’m excited to dig in today’s episode. We have a familiar voice. Our favorite weatherman, Eric Snodgrass. Thanks a lot, Eric, for joining us again. And for those listeners who don’t know you, why don’t you just take a moment and introduce yourself?
[00:00:55] Eric Snodgrass:
Sure. Again, Eric Snodgrass. I am Nutrien Senior Science Fellow. I’m an atmospheric scientist, and I forecast weather every day. We’re watching it for growers. We make tools. We try to answer questions about how weather’s impacting production ag, and it’s fun. I mean, the weather’s a mystery, right? It’s amazing how quickly it can change, and honestly, how poorly we are at trying to figure out what it’s gonna do next. But, uh, I guess that’s what keeps me in a job because there’s always some new problem to solve the next day.
[00:01:19] Amy Crozier:
Let’s kick off with just the big picture. Uh, you were on in April, and you talked about in the lower 48, there is drought. What does a drought map look like right now? And are we still chasing moisture?
[00:01:31] Eric Snodgrass:
Right now, as of our recording here, mid-July, we’re chasing moisture in the Western Corn Belt. All the storms have run north of it or south of it, but the Western Corn Belt’s been extremely dry, and they just went through a, a week of triple-digit heat and caused a flash drought scenario. From when we talked in April till now, we did see pretty good drought recovery in some key growing areas, specifically in pockets of the Midwest, the Lower Mississippi River Valley. And lately, we’ve even had some drought relief up the East Coast. We have a lot of business, of course, in Georgia, North, South Carolina, and upper Virginia. To see storms finally get into that area to relieve the drought is very, very good. A lot of the drought has moved farther to the west into the Rocky Mountains. You’ve probably seen some of the big wildfires that have taken shape in, like, Utah, in New Mexico, and even in Colorado this year.
[00:02:16] Eric Snodgrass:
Although, as we are here in the middle of July, the biggest fires are actually in Ontario, and they have been absolute monsters. What’s really happened, Amy, is we’ve kind of just, like, redistributed where the drought is, and that’s what happens in the middle of summer. It just kind of moves around, and the question’s always, is it on the most productive acres, or does it move to areas that don’t really impact the ag business as much as it could? Watching for quite a bit of it. But I’m gonna tell you this, on the flip side of this, away from drought, I talk about rain, which I’m sure we’ll talk more about in a few minutes. I’ve been absolutely amazed at how hyper-local the flooding has been this summer. Like, we’ve seen it across the Canadian Prairie, from the mountains in Alberta, all the way over to Ontario.
[00:02:53] Eric Snodgrass:
We’ve had flooding in my home state of Illinois. We had some places in Illinois that month of June picked up a foot of rain. And then right now, we’re talking about probably a disastrous event taking shape in Southern Texas down in the hill country down there, where in the last five or six days, I’ve got a few places that are approaching 30 inches of rainfall. That amount of rainfall in that region is gonna cause massive flooding and major problems, and unfortunately gonna put some lives at risk. It’s been quite the inequitable distribution of rainfall that has been most of my summer forecasting job.
[00:03:23] Amy Crozier:
Yeah, that’s fair. I’m up in Alberta, and we broke the 1914 record with rainfall, and it’s been challenging, but you drive across the prairies and you see the crops are looking great, and then you see pockets where we’re identifying waterfowl instead of looking at crops. In April, you also talked about the Missouri Basin, about having a low snow pack, and we’re really dependent on those spring rains. How did that play out?
[00:03:48] Eric Snodgrass:
It’s a good reminder that the lack of snow and winter can give you cause to worry about summer drought if spring doesn’t fix the problem. And in many places along the Missouri River, spring did. We start right at the end of the Missouri River. In Missouri, they had tremendous amounts of flooding across the river, and especially in the northern part of the state. But then you get over to where it is in Nebraska, it was super dry. South Dakota did okay. Montana had incredible June rains. You kinda look across the entire river basin, and I just drove over it yesterday, actually. I was up in Pierre, South Dakota, and I saw the river there, and it was flowing just fine. Yet I’ve also found folks that are in some of the tributaries into that river system farther to the south of that river flow. And they’re like, “Man, we are so deep in drought.
[00:04:29] Eric Snodgrass:
We would love to get anything to help us recover this.” And that’s one of the complexities of these massive river systems of which the United States has one of the biggest in the world with the Mississippi and then the Ohio and the Missouri and either side funneling into it. Those river systems are fragile, and we like to watch them to give us a, a good indicator on how a season is behaving with respect to precipitation.
[00:04:49] Amy Crozier:
You also mentioned, too, there was a split between east and west. What does that look like now?
[00:04:55] Eric Snodgrass:
Well, I probably should have told you the split was more north-south. We were seeing this, everything shape up where east of the Mississippi was looking wetter and west of the Mississippi was looking drier. But then as we got into the month of June, it was almost the whole Mississippi Basin was looking really, really wet. And to be honest with you, Amy, it started to bring in another part of the weather risk conversation in that years that have really, really wet conditions across the South in the United States, or up the Mississippi Basin, which 2026 has been, high leaf wetness hours tends to increase the risk of disease pressure. And so we got the word out early in June, like second week of June. I’m blasting out all across the company’s channels like we have got high leaf wetness hours. It’s been very humid. We’ve had a lot of precipitation.
[00:05:39] Eric Snodgrass:
This means mold spores and all those different fungal pressures. They’re gonna be able to move farther to the north. And already we were seeing indications of tar spot and all sorts of rust and all sorts of other fungal pressure on corn and soybeans showing up, which, because we were caught at early, I think a lot of folks were able to get out there and do additional passes of fungicide. That’s what I meant by north-south. We kinda had this south wet, and then the northern plains were dry. In April, I though, “Oh, it’d be east-west,” and turns out it was more like this than this. And that’s the nature of the business. It’s hard to predict out there beyond a couple of weeks.
[00:06:11] Amy Crozier:
I’ve seen lots of planes going overhead, a lot of fungicides going on with those wet conditions. And you also talked about we’re potentially watching one of the biggest El Ninos in history. So how did that play out?
[00:06:24] Eric Snodgrass:
This El Nino has, uh, been growing rapidly. In fact, it’s one of the fastest. Actually, I think it is the fastest transition from a La Nina to an El Nino that we’ve ever observed. And if you look across the Equatoro Pacific, which is where we kinda monitor for El Nino events, and by the way, it’s 7,000 miles of open ocean, just to be clear here. It’s a huge area. But the changes in the temperatures have been quite dramatic. This El Nino, as of mid-July, is already in what we would consider a strong category. Normally, they don’t really advance to this until you get into autumn, but this one’s a bit early. And there’s still quite a bit of warm water that will continue to upwell, making this probably our strongest El Nino event in history when you compare it to all of the other big events.
[00:07:03] Eric Snodgrass:
Like we had one in 23, one in 15, one in 97, 82. These were all big El Nino events. Now, the question is, I can just jabber on and on and on about all these kind of things, but what does it even mean? Well, why do we even care? Well, when you take water of a certain temperature and then you redistribute it across the equatorial Pacific or Atlantic, it shifts global weather patterns because all of our weather, all of it is born out of the fact that the planet is round, despite what you might see on Facebook. Trust me, it’s a round planet. But because it’s round, all the heat gets kind of trapped in the equator and has to go into the northern end of the southern hemisphere. Well, as that’s occurring, if there’s any sort of redistribution of the ocean temperatures underneath that, you can change where the biggest, baddest thunderstorms show up along the equator, and that changes the way the jet stream works.
[00:07:49] Eric Snodgrass:
So right now, all of the momentum in the jet stream as this El Nino’s been building, it’s in the southern hemisphere. It’s hit Australia. In fact, right now, as we’re talking, we’ve got a piece of the jet stream that’s left Australia and heading over toward Chile. This is going across the Southern Pacific Ocean at an average speed of 250 miles an hour. And we’re expecting 30 to 40 inches of rain up against the Andes in Chile right now because of that. Now, where we are in the Northern Hemisphere, well, the earth has to conserve momentum. All the speed is in the Southern Hemisphere due to this El Nino. It’s being stolen from the Northern Hemisphere. So what has it done? It’s slowed down the flow, given you hyper-local, very heavy rainfall, which is why you have ducks in your backyard. It’s giving the Western Corn Belt no rainfall because there’s a big ridge protecting it, a big dome of heat, and they’re just dying for a thunderstorm in there.
[00:08:37] Eric Snodgrass:
The thunderstorms are all running around the ridge of that, which is why it’s flooding in Texas. But it’s all one big, massive connected system. And what you have to remember about El Ninos is that usually in summer, we aren’t talking too much about their influence. It’s in autumn, it’s in fall, it’s in next spring that we think El Nino’s really gonna take over and be the most dominant piece of the weather forecasting conversation. What
[00:08:58] Amy Crozier:
Does that mean then for the hurricane season?
[00:09:00] Eric Snodgrass:
This is kinda neat. If an El Nino shows up, what it tends to do is it tends to bring winds which go across the equator from the east to the west. We call them trade winds. It tends to reverse those. And what that does is that repositions this pressure, the pressure pattern, and hence the winds, and tends to increase the wind share over the Caribbean, over the main development region in the Atlanta. We call it the MDR, the main development region, or over the Gulf. And what that typically does is, is it disrupts any sort of tropical development. Generally speaking, El Ninos tilt hurricane season toward the odds of fewer and weaker systems. Doesn’t mean you can’t get one. I mean, you can still have big hurricanes during El Nino years, but they’re more difficult to come by. What we’re hoping though, because we’ve honestly had a lot of flooding along the Gulf Coast this year, is that we hold off any sort of worry about tropical systems for a while simply because it’s been so wet, like we talked about the flooding in Texas recently.
[00:09:53] Eric Snodgrass:
It tends to suppress the hurricane season.
[00:09:55] Amy Crozier:
Interesting. Well, that’s good news for, at least we’re not watching out for some major hurricane season. You also talked about El Nino back in April. It means for a drier Australia. And you said the growers there are gonna be watching over the next nine months what that means for them. What is happening in Australia right now?
[00:10:12] Eric Snodgrass:
Remember, they’re in winter when we’re in summer. Okay. The biggest impact of an El Nino f- for the Southern Hemisphere is going to come in their spring and in their summer. It’s for us, it’s autumn and winter. For them, it’s spring and summer. We were telling the folks down in Australia, like, “Look, we know El Nino’s gonna be in the forecast, but this is not gonna affect you the way you think it might in June and July, which is the heart of their winter.” They’ve actually had some pretty wet conditions. In fact, there’s this inland lake there called Lake Air, and it is actually at the highest water depth and also greatest extent. It’s been in decades. They’re actually wet right now. The problem is going to be, as we go toward their spring, which is, of course, our fall, as we go toward their spring, we start to see the weather patterns blowing more dry interior air across the continent, and it tends to give them greater risk of having drought in their eastern growing area.
[00:11:02] Eric Snodgrass:
I think Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, maybe even to Tasmania, and also South Australia. They tend to have drier conditions. Right now, they’re all bracing for what could be drought building in, in their spring and following summer after having pretty darn good winter precipitation across broad areas. Now, in Australia, you gotta remember, they’re on the receiving end of every El Nino. Do you wanna think of the two spots in the world that have the greatest influence? Think like Australia, Indonesia, that region, and then Peru. That’s the starting and stopping point of these big El Nino events. They’re very concerned about where this can go as we go forward. And I’ve had to tell them, this El Nino may take us into some unprecedented territory. Every forecast you hear and every forecast that I give you, I would ask that you take it with a grain of salt, especially when we look at the longer term.
[00:11:46] Eric Snodgrass:
And I also tell them, don’t be reactionary to big weather forecasts because you’re gonna have a lot of meteorologists. To be honest with you, some of them just swing for the fences because they want the clicks and the views, and they are not giving you a really good tempered, measured view of what the weather’s actually doing. And sometimes that hide can be addictive. I’ll be honest with you. I’ve seen a lot of folks just feeding off of all the chaos around weather when I think the wisest thing to do is to step back, watch things unfold as they do, and make more calculated decisions about it.
[00:12:14] Amy Crozier:
Yeah, that’s great advice. When it comes down to agriculture and farming, it’s all about managing your risks. You also mentioned in April, there was a late seated saffron corn crop in Brazil. How’s that played out and how does that impact the markets? And you also talked about the European wheat market. Can you dive in a little bit into that one?
[00:12:33] Eric Snodgrass:
The Safrina corn crop in Brazil, specifically throughout the serrato, did go in a little bit late. The rain kinda ended a little early. We would’ve expected them to pull way back on total production, you know, how many millions of bushels or metric tons as they like to measure it, but it, it wasn’t newsworthy. And they’ve still got a crop out. They’re still harvesting it right now in the middle of their dry season. Then you go over to Europe. In other words, the South American story was kind of a dud. We across North America were kind of hoping for something to shake our prices up early in the season, but it wasn’t a big enough splash to really do that. But across parts of Western Europe, uh, Spain, getting into France, they had extremely dry conditions throughout late spring into early summer. Uh, some of the worst quality wheat crop we’ve seen out of that area in a long time.
[00:13:15] Eric Snodgrass:
We have a measurement called NDVI, which is where our satellites try to measure plant health. It was, uh, setting new record lows across France. Parts of Britain were extremely hot and dry. But then you go over to the other side of Europe toward Ukraine, the Russian. We built, you’re gonna be pretty hard-pressed to find widespread problems. And if you kinda split Europe in half west versus east, you’re gonna find that production out of Western Europe compared to, like, Ukraine and Russia, they’re not really on the same level. And as a result, we’re not hearing too big of a story other than the fact that it’s been so hot and dry in parts of Western Europe, specifically France and England as of late. Now, the big question I’m gonna have, Amy, is we’re in the middle of a dry season in South America, so let’s go back south of Quator.
[00:13:56] Eric Snodgrass:
They’re not allowed to do anything. They can’t plant any crops until they get into September. Some folks are allowed to plant September one. Most have to wait till September 15. If this El Nino plays out the way we think it’s gonna play out, there is cause to think that we’re gonna delay the planting of their first crop of soybeans. They wanna get that planted in October and November. Really, they wanna be done by the end of November. And what we have to think about is any delay in the planting of soybeans sets off their entire crop calendar. Now, this is important for nutrient. We have business down there. We don’t want this to occur. But if I’m a US farmer and I’m watching prices, anything to upset the Brazilian market is typically good for a US farmer. There’s always this back and forth between these two major production areas.
[00:14:38] Eric Snodgrass:
Here’s what I know. If the El Nino comes on and is as strong as anticipated, we expect as we go into September and October, November for there to be very wet conditions in Southern Brazil. States like Parana or Rio Grande del Sol, Santa Catarina, or even Sao Paulo, those areas tend to be wet. And then immediately to the north, just like you and I were talking about in the United States where the drought’s right next to the flooding, we expect through the serrata. So things like Bahia, uh, Minacirice, or you go into, uh, Goyas tokentines, and then the big one, Madagroso, they may be a little drier than average, especially in October and early November. And if that’s the case, they’ll wait to plant soybeans. It will not affect the soybean crop. The soybean crop will still get its full chance at growing and everything, but it’ll delay the planting that Safrina crop, which is corn, later in the season, and that could be problematic.
[00:15:27] Eric Snodgrass:
One, because it affects when the crop comes out, therefore it affects global supply and the shipping of it. And the second is, if it finishes under very dry conditions. I’m talking next April, May, and June. If it finishes under dry conditions, it could peel back on the yield. All these questions are great, but the biggest one we have to consider is, will Brazil continue to add somewhere between three and 4% additional acreage this upcoming growing season, like they’ve been doing for at least the last decade? If they do, the added acres offset weather problems easily. And we’re just waiting to see what those intentions are gonna look like. My guess is that they’re gonna go after more acres again this year.
[00:16:01] Amy Crozier:
That’s interesting. And because we’re always watching when we’re looking at the markets for a disaster in somebody else’s backyard to improve our prices, improve our carry out the grain crops or soybeans. We’re always watching that. When we shift back to the US, you were talking last time about the Elvis rule and watching that Memphis Nashville corridor. And how is that impacting that corn belt?
[00:16:26] Eric Snodgrass:
It was wet there in April and May. Not crazy wet now like it was a year ago, but there was plenty of moisture in the lower Mississippi River Valley in the Mid-South. We got into the month of June, and it was wet from Iowa all the way over to Indiana and Ohio. Just had plenty of rain to the north of it. And that’s what’s bought us time in the month of July to keep this heat that we’re dealing with here now, not just tearing our crops apart and causing major, major problems. The Elvis rule only applies April and May to predict June and early July. The Elvis rule is now over. We gotta go on to think about other things. And the big topic is gonna be what we call ridge riders. In fact, I should get like a leather jacket that says ridge riders on the back and buy a motorcycle and ride around in it.
[00:17:02] Eric Snodgrass:
But it’s in the middle of summer, the jet stream likes to just block up into these big giant ridges and storms run all over the edge of them. And this is why you’ve seen so much rain. This is why parts of Southern Saskatchewan and also Manitoba have seen plenty of rain. All of those ridge riding storms have gone through that area. In fact, by the way, not, not to deviate from this, but did you see in Alberta? And I forgot the name of the lake. Darn it. But there’s a team of researchers in the United States that chases tornadoes with drones. It’s called the Otis Project, O-T-U-S Project. By the way, just go look it up on YouTube. Anybody that’s listening, go do this. They flew a drone into a tornado going over a lake and had a rainbow in the foreground. It’s like the most photogenic thing I’ve ever seen.
[00:17:44] Eric Snodgrass:
But that tells you where the storms are. They’ve been in the Southern Canadian Prairie, but they’ve missed, like, the Red River Valley of the North. They’ve missed parts of South Dakota. And, uh, they’ve also missed Ontario where all those terrible fires are right now. Elvis rules out. We’re now watching what we call the ridge running or ridge riding thunderstorms. And if you’re in the Midwest, you want the ridge to go as far west as you can take it. Like, if you could put it over in Nevada, that’s perfect. But if that ridge hangs out too close to the middle part of the United States, we tend to see flash drought situations taking over like what’s happening right now in South Dakota.
[00:18:14] Amy Crozier:
So we have had tornadoes in Alberta and a lot of tornado warnings, and I am definitely gonna go check that out for the beautiful rainbow and tornado. Well, you’re looking at weather risks then for the northern states and for Canada. What are we watching for? What should we expect going forward?
[00:18:32] Eric Snodgrass:
One of my big concerns in the US right now, especially for some of our major crops like corn and soybeans, is we’ve had some very warm overnight lows. And we know that the crop, it needs to, for lack of a better way of saying it, it needs to rest at night. We need the crop to be able to turn off its respiration processes and to do that to conserve energy. And of course, it’s all about energy. It’s about the movement of sugar to put it into a kernel or into a seed. When it’s too hot at night, that process doesn’t shut down, and therefore the crop is expending more of its energy staying cool and staying alive than making grain. I don’t like the fact that we’ve had such warm, humid and muggy nights. We need to cool things off and get a little drier air in place.
[00:19:08] Eric Snodgrass:
The temperatures are backing off. They’re backing off for Canada, they’re backing off for the US, and they’re all going into the Pacific Northwest with much hotter conditions into early next week. The problem is the Northwest, we don’t want all that additional heat this time of year. To be seven to 10 degrees above average in, like, Washington and the Columbia Basin, it’s too hot. We don’t want that. But it’s always a sacrifice. Like you said a moment ago, someone’s gonna have the bad weather at the expense of someone else having the good weather. The cool down that’s coming from the Canadian Prairie through the Midwest is needed, but it’s at the expense of the Northwest. What I’ve learned from the 2026 growing season is the weather pattern has been kind of on this eight to 10-day cadence. Here’s eight to 10 days of heat, and then we back it off with cooler weather.
[00:19:47] Eric Snodgrass:
Or you might get eight to 10 days of, like, nonstop storms, and then you get a little bit of a reprieve from that, which means as we go through the rest of July and into the month of August, we’re in a reprieve time period right now with some cooler weather that’s, at least it’s gonna start soon. And then I expect it to jump right back up. And most of our forecasts are trying to keep most of August from the Canadian Prairie through the Central United States with above average temperatures. Which, if they stay too warm, especially overnight, could start to peel back on some of these national yield numbers that are being projected right now.
[00:20:16] Amy Crozier:
What’s on your radar going into the harvest season?
[00:20:19] Eric Snodgrass:
There’s a couple of big things. Between now and harvest, we are at the time of year, this would be July and August, where we have the most common type of thunderstorm called squall lines or MCSs, Mesoscale Convective Storm Systems. That’s the nerd speak for straight line winds. When you get into this time of year, our storms tend to be more linear in their shape rather than individual storm clusters. And when they do that, they can produce a lot of straight line wind damage should they take off. Just as a reminder, think August of 2020 in Iowa, I think it was August 10th, we had the big derecho that went across and knocked out seven and a half million acres. That’s just one example of many of these types of storms. Until we get there, my biggest worry is when the ridge riders come through, are they linear in shape, therefore produce some strong straight line winds?
[00:21:04] Eric Snodgrass:
That’s number one. Number two is we must continue to fight the disease pressure because of how high the humidity has been, the leaf wetness hours, and the movement of a lot of those fungal pressures farther to the north. We’re doing a lot of fungicide passes here in the United States as well to try to mitigate the loss due to that. The farther we go toward harvest, now this is really quite important. El Nino’s gonna become a bigger story. And the way you need to think about El Ninos is when we transition into fall, all that speed of momentum I told you earlier that was leaving Australia, going into Chile, that all comes to the Northern Hemisphere. And what it tends to do is it tends to shove our jet stream across the United States and across Southern Canada at greater velocities, greater speed. What we tend to get out of that is we tend to have more opportunity to get wetter weather as you approach October and November.
[00:21:49] Eric Snodgrass:
Now, where I live in Illinois, October, November are huge harvest months. What we’ve found is typically when you start harvest in the Midwest, there’s usually about a 40-day span to when you start harvest, finish harvest, and then get your fall field work done, your fall application, your tillage, anything you’re gonna do before the conditions just get too bad to do anything else. Maybe you have snow, maybe it’s too cold, whatever. El Nino years shrink that by 20%. You go from 40 days on average to like 32. We’re concerned that this upcoming fall may have tighter windows to get work done, which means folks are gonna have to push hard as they go forward into this fall, given that El Nino typically does that kind of behavior across a big section of the central part of North America.
[00:22:30] Amy Crozier:
I remember it wasn’t too long ago that we had really wet weather in the fall, and we were actually combining after the snow melted, and we were dealing with a really compressed season, and it definitely impacts that harvest. We’ve gone across the globe and touched on what we should be looking out for through the summer and into the fall. What would you like to leave the listeners with? What are your final thoughts that you really want them to take
[00:22:55] Eric Snodgrass:
Home? There’s two things. I hate to say this, but we’re not very good at our jobs. Like, I had a group from Australia contact me last night and they’re like, “We need a three-month forecast every day.” I’m like, “Wait, that doesn’t exist. I can’t give you a three-month forecast of every day is exactly what it’s gonna be.” But they were making some huge plans, and I had to tell them our forecast horizon in terms of being very skillful to tell you what to expect. Maybe it’s seven to 10 days. Beyond 10 days, we can give you pretty good information on the over, under like, oh, it’s looking warmer than average or cooler than average or wetter or drier, but that’s it. I can’t pinpoint rainfall amounts for you. Beyond that, when we get out there longer term, it’s really just looking at these big global teleconnection events like El Nino.
[00:23:35] Eric Snodgrass:
That’s just one of them. We watch over a dozen of these things to try to just keep an eye on where things are gonna go. I guess what I’m asking is that as you consume weather information, understand our limits and predictability. They’re real. Uh, and if you ever find a meteorologist that acts like they can predict everything perfectly, they’re lying to you by virtue of talking. I think the last thing I would share with folks is, hey, watch what’s going on with El Nino and the way we’re communicating about it, because it’s gonna be the main global climate driver going into the next six to nine months. I think we just need to pay attention to what it could possibly give us for this upcoming winter.
[00:24:07] Amy Crozier:
Well, thank you very much, Eric, for your update. It’s always very insightful. And I know as a farmer, everyone talks about the weather. It’s our number one topic. We’re always wondering what’s gonna happen. We look forward to having you back again. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning into this episode of The Dirt. And to learn more, check us out on nutrient-economics with a K.com. Thanks, and have a great day.
[00:24:33] The Dirt PodKast:
Farming isn’t farming without questions, and now there’s a place to go for answers. At Economics, an entire team of agronomists are ready and waiting to help for free. No question is too big or too small. Visit nutrient-economicswik.com and submit your question with the ask an agronomist feature. How can I tell a fertilizer investment will make sense for my operation?
[00:25:01] Karl Wyant:
We have a couple tools that free to use on our nutrient economics page, and one is starting with that soil sample. When thinking about a soil sample, think about it like a bank account statement for your ground. You can actually take that soil sample and assess which nutrients are low in the soil, which might limit your yield potential that year, and which ones are high. You can interpret that range and actually build out a custom fertilizer program and invest where you have a strong probability of fantastic fertilizer response, and those are usually in those lower soil supply conditions. Conversely, you don’t get a big of a return on your investment from fertilizer if you’re putting fertilizer on top of a soil that has a high background soil supply rate. There’s a little bit of wiggle room in between, and those soil samples can really help you dial in which nutrients you need to focus on.
[00:25:46] Karl Wyant:
The other piece we have to talk about is our input calculator that we just released. And this allows you to enter all of your information from your equipment spend, labor, fertilizer, crop protection, and you can put all your inputs in and actually see how do the inputs break out as a percentage of your total spend? Where are you putting your money? Which buckets are getting filled? And then start making some decisions on how does that actually go against your overall financial goals for the farm.
[00:26:13] The Dirt PodKast:
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