I asked a very pointed question a few weeks ago about what people are using for Nutrient Sufficiency Numbers on corn. Since so many talk a good game about balancing soil to get the crop what it needs I figured we would get good conversation. And maybe our community could finally learn something concrete in this dept from other posters. We didn't learn anything - there was a lot of talking around the issue and some posters say they can't put numbers out because they are sworn to secrecy. I have to respect that but it doesn't help anything.

Below is a chart I put together from various land grants across the Midwest. You will notice that numbers do not vary much between universities. One might think there was collusion to come up with similar numbers, however if you know of the inner workings at many universities you would know some professors don't even discuss what they are doing with others in their dept let alone across the Midwest. Interestingly one of the comments on micros from several universities was this: "We were not able to get a response to any additions of micronutrients at these ranges of tissue tests we see @ R1 therefore we are not able to build a response curve". This is a major issue when building response curves to many minor nutrients - the soil supplies enough that you can't test for them as they don't limit yield. However that was not the message I got a few weeks ago from on-farm usage of NAT posters as they knew what they were short of and their additions increased yields - without any testing of the hypothesis

Since nobody filled in their own numbers last time I filled in the blanks from known sources. Now do you think the sufficiency numbers here are too low, OK, too high?

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