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| Banding the fertilizer complicates soil fertility evaluation. Conventional soil tests presume randomly placed samples are representative of the whole field because in the past century the whole field has been plowed, disked, and field cultivated to move any applied and resident fertilizer around, uniform mixing. When the applied fertilizer is worked into the tilled strips its more concentrated in those strips but much less in between the strips. And over years of strip tilling, some of the field is never stirred. I allege that new soil sampling techniques need to be developed. Sampling in strips will tend to show plenty left over and sampling the untilled strips will tend to show severr shortages after several years. Either an equal amount of core samples taken centered in the tilled strips and the untilled strips mixed thoroughly or a blade sample from row center to row center may work. Indeed detailed samples across the tilled strip may show different fertility from imperfect mixing and root extraction concentration.
Then when the wet and dry fertilizers are injected and thoroughly mixed in the strips, there's nothing left on the surface to blow or wash away like it can from spreading, so there's a chance a greater portion of the applied dry fertilizer gets in the ground for the roots to access.
Making fall strips, definitely warms up the strips better in the spring that full notill.
I full tilled, then I no tilled, now my tenant strip tills and he's producing bigger crops than I did on the same ground. He is using more fertilizer than I did my last notill corn year but less than he used to apply.
Gerald J. | |
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strip till fertilizer savings??
