2-7 IAN Banded Fertilizer

Soil scientists have long recommended farms be soil tested every four years. It helps producers understand the fertility of the land - and what needs to be done to maintain and manage that fertility.

The old standard for taking a test was to simply pull a spade full of dirt about seven-inches deep. That hasn’t worked for a while - for about as long as the moldboard plow has been out of fashion. The plow ensured nutrients applied on the soil were mixed pretty evenly into the soil. No-till, conservation tillage and strip till have mostly eliminated that mixing process - says Dr.Fabian Fernandez. This soil fertility specialist says a lot of thought has to go into taking a soil sample. “If you are banding the fertilizer then you start creating these patterns of high and low fertility as you move across the field. When either one of these happens you have to be really conscious of how you take a soil sample so you will represent the fertility of that field.”

 So a banded fertilizer program - even a broadcast fertilizer program - requires soil samples be gathered in much a more precise way than in the past. Seven inches isn’t deep enough anymore - and Fernandez says a spade just won’t do the job accurately enough. “It is not only the depth that it is making sure that you represent each layer of that soil uniformly. If you use a spade typically what happens is you end up having a triangle when you take a soil sample. The best option is to use a core which would be a uniform diameter.”