Why and When Do We Fertilize? // PASTURE HEALTH

[Music] welcome back we're going to be doing some fertilizing today we just got to go pick up the buggy and then we're going to be spreading it over a couple of the fields here [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] prior to applying fertilizer we worked with valley ag to do a series of soil samples in a variety of our pastures to determine which ones were in need of additional nutrients these soil tests evaluate ph percentage of organic matter as well as essential nutrients such as nitrogen phosphorus potassium magnesium sulfur and calcium valley ag then gives us a fertilizer recommendation based on the results of these tests we have this buggy that's behind us here uh that spreads it out we calculate uh exactly how much is going on per acre so we can get an exact amount that we're putting on so the way the spreader works is this uh belt pulls the fertilizer material drops down here and then as we're going across the field these are spinning these here are spinning so the fertilizer drops onto these and that spins out and it throws it out so it throws 40 feet each way so we make a 80 foot swath across the field putting down 100 100 pounds of material per acre we turn around and then we come back alongside that swath and we keep doing that back and forth until we're across the field this is how we calculate it and we want to put on about a hundred pounds of sold material so we set that we set the gauge at two and a quarter inches and if we wanted to put on more material obviously we'd open up a little bit more if we want to put on less we would do so that's about two and a quarter pounds or two and a quarter inches i'm sorry which is equivalent to 105 pounds per acre of material going on this is the drive that drives the spinners so we should be all set we always say should be until we actually do it make sure it works conducting soil tests and applying the proper amount of fertilizer allows us to optimize our pasture production protect the environment from contamination by runoff or leaching of excess fertilizer and improve the nutrient balance of the growing media timing of these applications is also important applying fertilizer during the plant's vegetative state ensures that nutrients are taken up versus being leached out precipitation also plays a role as high precip such as during the winter would cause unnecessary leaching and would be during the plant's dormant stage [Music] right now we're spending about 100 pounds of fertilizer per acre of that 40 percent is nitrogen and six percent is sulfur it's being spread out in little pellets and the reason why we're doing it right now is we're gonna be getting some rain here within the next couple of days so that's gonna dissolve the little pellets let them become available in the soil for the plants and hopefully we'll get some really good grass growth we also choose to use the pellets because they slowly release the fertilizer into the soil versus liquid fertilizer that makes the nutrients immediately available but is not retained as long in the soil [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] we were able to get a couple of fields done this afternoon but we still have a few to finish tomorrow morning we're not going to drag you all along for that but thank you so much for joining us today and we'll see you all again soon we look forward to showing you more of what we do here on the ranch in the next one you

Channel: Colvin Ranch

Views: 6,274

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Id: X4cFM5OsWzc

Length: 6min 8sec (368 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2022