Harnessing the Full Potential of Soil Microbes

Harnessing the Full Potential of Soil Microbes

Tim Hammerich
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
It’s time for your Farm of the Future Report. I’m Tim Hammerich.

We know that to achieve optimal yields you need optimal nutrition, but that isn’t always as simple as adding more N-P-K. Jeff Divan is the senior manager for sales agronomy for Sound Agriculture, which creates nutrient use efficiency products to harness the full potential of soil microbes.

Divan… “All the headlines go to bigger yields, good trend lines, but what's kind of happening in the background is we're doing it in a less efficient manner. So it takes more pounds of nitrogen to grow a bushel of corn today than it did 50 years ago. So with increased applications of synthetic fertilizer, we're really allowing those bacteria and those microbes to become lazy and not produce for us throughout the season. So we have an opportunity in really many different types of soil, many different parts of the country, to wake up what's there and existing in the soil and put it to work later in the season when we really need those nutrients to be available, to finish out our crop.”

These microbes are helpful for processes like fixing nitrogen and making phosphates more soluble for the crop. Sound Agriculture’s product, SOURCE, is a foliar-applied chemistry that activates these microbes.

Divan… “Even though they're in the presence of nitrogen and phosphorus, which would typically make them less active, sending that signal to promote that activity. And then they start to form a symbiotic relationship with the plant.”

Divan says this allows producers to reduce fertilizer requirements and increase yield.

Previous ReportBiological Solution to Weed Resistance
Next ReportIt's Not Blockchain That Matters - It's Data