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Central South Dakota | No standing water here usually. If there is we can't tile anyway because in the governments eyes the prarie pot hole region has to pay for the sins of all the tile over east. Were in an 17-20 inch a year rainfall area so any moisture we get is precious. Hence the reason I've been so vigilant about trying to build organic matter. We have a few area where tile would be beneficial if you had the control structure to raise or lower the water table, but NRCS would throw a fit of mega proportions.
We are pretty aggressive on our yield goals for our area, but not so much so that we are not hitting them or we come very close most of the time. I can't claim success for the entire program as it has been 30+ year process, but I have done the fertilizer on these farms for the past 18 years or so along with our crop advisor. My biggest pet peeve though is I won't broadcast fertilizer unless it is an extreme circumstance. It is all banded at planting with either the drill or planter. Our other big accomplishment was going from .05-1% OM in the 80's to almost 5%OM across the farm as of today.
The high phosphorus runs at an angle across our farm northeast to southwest for about 2.5 miles. The highest p test we ever pulled was 115ppm all the way down to 11ppm, but we have many spots that will average from 25-30ppm to 60-80ppm. This was the reason I made the big push for variable rate fertilizer, the P savings over the years have more than paid for the few upgrades we had to make to do it.
Our biggest advantage is we do not seem to leach nutrients away in our soils the way it can happen out east. If we look to have a high yielding year and place more nitrogen out, it will still be there the next year, I don't have to worry about it disappearing. | |
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Soil test........
