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NW Illinois | I'll speak from a retailer standpoint. From the perspective of a former coop retail facility manager to today running my own business.
I started in 1994, we were 60% UAN, 35% AA, and maybe 5 % Urea. UAN was mostly pre emerge with very little used sidedress. AA was 50% fall, 25% spring preplant, 25% sidedress. Urea was only pre plant spring with complete spring dry spreading. It was a terrible system back then since equipment was not good and no guidance equipment made a lot of bad applications. It was dropped very quickly.
Quickly was started removing the AA rental equipment. Sidedress AA disappeared completely at this point. Moving those tons into UAN mostly. Next we removed the fall rental bar fleet. This moved us as a location to 90% UAN and 10% AA.
We lost some business in that conversion, so we brought in a custom AA application service and by around 2005 that moved us to maybe 80% UAN and 20% AA. By this point virtually no AA was spring applied anymore.
We stayed that way until maybe 2010 when we started doing sidedress Urea on corn. We made that which because the customers thought that's what was missing. For retail it generated another application charge and sold nitrogen stabilizer that we had not previously been selling. These Urea tons reduced UAN usage and did little to affect AA volumes. Next was a short attempt at Y drops. This was ruled out as it was much more time consuming than Urea post applied.
In the last 5 years local retail has been on a significant push back into fall custom AA. This is mostly driven based on equipment costs and employee usage. With that costs of owning new row crop sprayers, there just isn't enough money to budget an employee having a terragator for high rate UAN and a post rig. So terragator dollars were moved into covering post machine costs. This creates an issues in high rate situations of UAN. These 1200 gallon Deeres just can't move the volumes and are making messes traversing the field many times to reload. So reducing the UAN use in the spring by doing fall AA custom is a better solution. There is also more manpower for usage in the fall to run custom AA rigs. When the terragators started leaving that meant they quit spreading lime. This freed manpower to run the custom AA equipment.
I;m just old, and still own a terragator to spring apply UAN at high rates if my personal business.
In the end most decisions about which nitrogen source, where I'm from, is driven by machinery costs and manpower usage and secondarily about agronomic principals. Sometimes they both meet the same agenda but there is always one that is more dominate in the discussions in the back offices.
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How has N source changed on your farm/in your area?
