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SC Wisconsin | I understand the desire to reduce costs, but a major weakness of using zones and decreasing the number of samples opens the door to being wrong about one's assumptions about your zone... that being they are treated the same and therefor sampled with too few samples. Soil pH data in my part of the world screams for more samples! One ton of lime runs around $20 by the time it is trucked, dumped, loaded and applied. P & K removals run around $40-50/acre/year. I can easily justify high density sampling and lab fees when considering the cost of lime, DAP and 0-0-60 on an annual basis.
One question many zone folks don't answer around here is: How do you manage pH, P & K variability within a zone? Most don't manage it. We can do much better if we focus on ROI to all inputs, including information.
I am all ears for strategies to reduce the costs of sampling and lab analysis, just haven't seen reducing the number of samples as a very useful cost reduction strategy over the past 30 years. | |
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VRT fertilizer recs based on ZONES and not GRIDS?
