It’s tempting for growers to cut fertility programs across the board this year to offset input costs. The most successful growers, however, are spending with intention. Gabe Saxon, an agronomist with AgroLiquid, is giving Southeast growers a straightforward piece of advice.
“I think key tips are we start at the beginning. Again, we always want to look at the soils. We’re having some tough years this year,” said Saxon.
“Soils are calling for some things and we’re not, we may be skipping on those up front, reallocate some funds later and maybe not even reallocate funds. But when we start to look at this year and last year and several years where we’re budgeting so tight, we really need to look at, okay, if we cut some things up front, we need to make sure that we’re adding those in later on. I start to look at a lot of things when we talk about nutrient uptake curves, when we talk about where the plant is in its physiological stages and are we in vegetative or are we in reproductive? We’ve got to pay attention to that because that’s going to tell us what nutrients are needed at that point in time in that plant’s lifecycle,” Saxon added.
Saxon also said, “I think we need to pay attention to that. I’m never going to recommend that you don’t put some type of fertilizer out up front or a maintenance fertilizer, but years are tough right now. And if we don’t pay attention to that, we’ll get late in the season, Dale, and we will start running out of stuff.”
“And then what do we do? So I think if we’re planning on budgeting, we need to budget the bare minimum. And if we’re budgeting the bare minimum, I think we need to look at a different avenue later on in the season. So like we talked about in an earlier deal, we need to reallocate those funds,” Saxon added.
“We need to be planning to have some of those key nutrients, especially during stressful situations. We need to have those key nutrients ready to go available that we can kind of spoon feed them throughout the season and just keep things going,” said Saxon.
Audio Reporting by Elizabeth Sanders for Southeast AgNet.