20 miles west of Indianapolis Indiana | Dan Loehr - 1/18/2026 18:03
FWIW laying tile this week if we can get stuff started :-)
Now you got me listening when ya mention tile!
Ha.
That’s not any jab on you or anyone on fertility. I may be regretting any of this in 5 years.
I can’t decide if I’m a believer that we can feed the plant or if we feed the soil and that feeds the plant. Nitrogen on corn, we feed the plant id say we should mostly agree on (we I mean not Dan necessarily, but U.S. farmers), sulfur, probably feed the plant. And some soil maybe. Phos and potassium… do we feed the plant with dry spreads? Or liquid planter apps? These guys using strip till and running 1/2 rates and saying no drop on yield? That’s gotta be a plant feed application. Theres the talk of thousands and thousands of pounds of P or K in some soils that’s unavailable. Heck if there’s 2000# of P and I can spend $20 an acre on something to unlock enough for my corn crop, am i cheating the landlord or did I do something smart that someone else wouldn’t have done and not harmed the farm more than .000001% of the P? Does a $25 cover crop recycle nutrients from unavailable to available? If it does why doesn’t my corn or soybeans do the same? Then there’s the guys selling snake oils that claim X more efficiently of product next to the row, low salt this and than. How many times have we all said when someone comes along and offers $75-100 an acre more than someone for a farm that they are just going to mine it for X number of years and let it go after yields drop like a rock? I can remember a few farmers in my area that we used to say that about and most of em still operate those farms or just got outbid by someone else by not much but lost it. Not like we saw spindly stalks of corn falling over while ours next door looked like oak trees standing tall. I saw some crap crops in spots but i think a lot of that was crappy planter singulation poor N practices. and I’m of the belief we need to be putting some on, but I’m to the point i wish I had a consistent supply of manure and wasn’t so close to “townies” that I could put on a slew every 4 years ahead of 4 year contracts and that be my P.
So many crazy ideas as we question everything trying to find those extra dollars. If we skimp now to survive $4 corn will be have the bushels to save us at $6 corn when it comes? Will we ever be able to afford to build the soils back up if those backing off are in fact doing the wrong thing? Is $800 phosphorus going to look cheap in 5 years?
(Again, none of this direct AT, just with you in conversation, always appreciate your post Dan)
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200bu corn P&K removal
