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West TN | Today we were able to harvest the replicated plots comparing Nutricharge, Powerplant, and untreated.
The untreated outyielded the Nutricharge and Powerplant plots by 4 and 5 bushels/acre. I have not run statistical analysis to determine if the results are statistically significant but I doubt they are. Nevertheless, at a cost of $11.25/acre for 9 oz of Nutricharge and $14/bag of corn seed for Powerplant, there definitely was not a return on investment in this instance.
I will NOT say that Powerplant and Nutricharge do not work. It has been proven to work on other farms. I will say that those products did not work on this farm, this crop, under my management practices, in this single year. Whether the reason that they did not work is related to flooding conditions early, extreme drought conditions after tasseling, existing nutrient availability, our soil health practices, etc, is impossible to say with just one year of data. I do have a feeling that our practice of having living roots 12 months out of the year do recycle nutrients, break the chemical bonds making nutrients unavailable for plant uptake, and make nutrient more available to our cash crops and may be doing the job that Nutricharge and Powerplant are designed to do.
I have spent several hours talking with one of the persons that worked on developing the products and I believe that there is sound science behind the products. However, our understanding of soil and all the interactions in the soil with plants, chemistry, and biology is very limited at this point and I believe that is the reason why we do not always see consistent, positive performance from a lot of different products.
My main takeaway from this test plot is for ALL farmers to perform their own tests on their own farm under their management practices before spending $$$ on ANY new product that they are thinking about introducing into their program. There is NO room in row crop agriculture to be spending money on inputs that have not reliably provided a positive ROI.
I would like to thank Titan Ag for donating the products for my research purposes as it would have been unfeasible for me to purchase the products for the small replicated plots.
Edited by robmgrig 9/8/2025 21:56
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 Nutricharge (full).png (114KB - 43 downloads)
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Nutricharge and Powerplant Replicated Test Plot Results
