Join us for our soil nutrition series with our Fertiliser Specialist & National Account Manager – Neville Janke.
Below you’ll find transcriptions of the above videos, if you’d like to review the information on soil nutrition.
Soil Nutrition Part 1
Hello, I’m Neville Janke and welcome to Feed Central’s nutritional advice section. I’d like to show you today just some of our soil that we have on our own farm at Charlton, Toowoomba. I’d just like to show you the soil that we’ve planted a crop of oats into. This soil that we have is actually a living soil because it’s producing a crop. It’s not just dirt. Some people explain that soils are just dirt, or dirt is dead soil, but this soil is alive and living because it’s producing a crop. We can see the beautiful picture of the root systems going down into the soil.
So, during a segment of talking about soils and agronomy and the fertilisers required, over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to show you how living soil then, and we can do a soil test of this soil and develop a fertiliser program to suit this crop or to suit a crop that would suit your farm. So, I’d like to take you through some different steps of what we have promoted and experienced in my days of dealing with fertilisers and my days in agronomy.
So, if we like to start and have a think about the way a plant is sewn into the soil and then the soil becomes what we know as a living soil. So, a living soil, what does that mean to you? A living soil is all about the minerals that are within the soil, the air that feeds the microbes, the moisture that grows the crop, and also the air that’s within it. And the mulch that breaks down to feed the whole plant system.
So, farming today, every living human being on this earth can be thankful for the top four inches of soil across this earth because without that, and the fact that it rains, we don’t survive. So, we’re talking about a living soil where a seed is planted into the soil, and this being an oats plant, it then springs into life and draws the nutrient from the soil, and takes it up into itself, and grows a nice green crop, and then up into a seed head, and you can either harvest or make it into feed for animals.
So, in our journey of nutrition, I’ll take you through some of the steps of taking a soil test, understanding a soil test, and then leading you through the path of how that crop will then suit to feed out to an animal or to go as a seed.
Thank you.
Soil Nutrition Part 2
G’day, I’m Neville Janke. Welcome to the second part of our soil nutrition part of Feed Central and what we’re offering to farmers today. I would just like to show you the basics of a soil test. We’ve planted this paddock down, and I just wanted to go through a couple of simple tips of what you can do to take a soil test. If you don’t have soil testing equipment like a probe, like this one, and push into the soil, you can just use a basic spade to take a test.
Thinking about what a young probe is, you can actually just take a sample, push it into the soil four or so inches, about 100 millimeters, where that top speed line and pop the little core into your bucket. What you do is you take a representative sample across the paddock, steering away from contour banks, washouts, and so forth. Taking about ten samples across, walk back on another diagonal through, you can get at least 50 odd cores out of this, sent into your bucket to take the sample. From there, you can mix it in your bucket and take some out, about a couple of two percent, to send to the laboratory.
That’s one way if you have that machine, or you can just use a spade. Pick up the spade, and you can take a little sample down into the soil with that. Take the first pull out, then dig yourself a hole about 100 mm deep where the root systems are feeding, and then take a little core of the only edge. Taking a little sliver off the edge, and you’ve got something like that, so drop that into your bucket.
So, what you’re actually doing is taking a little bit from the top right down to the bottom of your cut, and you do that again on the representative line across ten or so sites across, and then also sites across the other way. So you’ll get 20 odd sites across your paddock as being a representative of your paddock. Again, steering clear of contour banks, washouts, drains, pitches, and then hard patches. So you’ll get a basic view of your paddock’s soil. A soil test is like the big picture of what you’re dealing with.
Thank you for your time today.
Soil Nutrition Part 3
Good day, now we’re back with the next part. We’ve sent the soil sample to the laboratory. It’s time there to have a look at your farm plan and check out just what you want to get from having and doing a soil test. I call it the ‘Identify Your Operation’ stage, where it’s your cropping and part grazing, or your rotation grazing, or your winter-summer crop rotation broadacre, whether you’re into cotton, cereals, sorghum, pulses, legumes. So really have a look and digest within yourselves your own operation and where it fits in the plan that you’ve got for your own farm.
I like to think you might get to think long-term, thinking three years out, saying what’s the crop rotation going to be for this field and that field, and how does that fit with your mix of legumes and cereals. Then look at the requirements of the plan, check out then this soil structure. Are there improvements that you need to do, or can you address them at this time? Look at erosion control. Maybe it’s time for some deep ripping, organic matter. How much organic matter is left in the soil and on the soil? What supplies of manure are available? What’s the equipment required to apply manures and do soil amendments? What are the resources on the farm? All these questions fit into the farm plan.
We can take this just one step at a time and fit back into what they’re, in fact, additional requirements then will come from the soil report and fit that back into the farm plan, looking at the crop that you’re thinking about growing, what your pasture requirements are, or what the cereals, or legumes, or what it is, what it requires to fit into that farm plan.
So until next chapter, have a look at your farm plan. Thanks, Neville Janke.
Soil Nutrition Part 4
Good day, now we’re back with the next part. We’ve sent the soil sample to the laboratory. It’s time to have a look at your farm plan and check out just what you want to get from having and doing a soil test. I call this the ‘Identify Your Operation’ stage, where it’s your cropping and part grazing, or your rotation grazing, or your winter-summer crop rotation broadacre, whether you’re into cotton, cereals, sorghum, pulses, legumes. Really take a moment to look and digest within yourselves your own operation and where it fits in the plan that you’ve got for your own farm.
I like to think you might want to think long-term, thinking three years out, asking what’s the crop rotation going to be for this field and that field, and how does that fit with your mix of legumes and cereals. Then, look at the requirements of the plan, check out the soil structure. Are there improvements that you need to do, or can you address them at this time? Look at erosion control. Maybe it’s time for some deep ripping, organic matter. How much organic matter is left in the soil and on the soil? What supplies of manure are available? What’s the equipment required to apply manures and do soil amendments? What are the resources on the farm? All these questions fit into the farm plan.
We can take this just one step at a time and fit back into what they’re, in fact, additional requirements that will come from the soil report and fit that back into the farm plan, looking at the crop that you’re thinking about growing, what your pasture requirements are, or what the cereals, or legumes, or what it is, what it requires to fit into that farm plan.
So until next chapter, have a look at your farm plan. Thanks, Neville Janke.
Soil Nutrition Part 5
Well, we’re back again, top-up time. This time the crop is now growing. Do we use foliar fertilizer, or do we use some granular nitrogen to top it up? How do we know what that crop really needs? So, it’s all about then testing the plant, which can be known as a leaf test or a Brix, a SAP test. You can use a meter, a little bit like this, being a Brix meter. You crush some of the leaf, get the sap, and put it on the prism, and you can check it from there. That’s really just a guide to the mineral sugar levels in your plant. It can either be a higher rating or a lower rating; anything above 12 is often very good.
I like to use a plant leaf test, and the leaf test is one where you take the last fully formed leaves, pick them, collect them up, and get them in a sample bag, and we send it off to the laboratory. Often, I’d like to even encourage you to do a moisture level test as well when you’re thinking of doing a top-up, or when you’re thinking of using some foliar fertilizer. Brand your fertilizer onto your plant, how much moisture have you got in the soil? The easiest way to check that is to take a shovel, dig deep down into the root system, and see if you can make a mud ball out of the moist soil around the roots. If you can make a mud ball, then you’ve got enough moisture in there to do a foliar spray over the top for a top-up.
So, assess that, check your moisture levels, and then take your leaf sample from there. From there, the lab sends a report. Use a qualified advisor to help you assess what you need to read the levels that come back on that test. Then, you can develop a foliar program to suit.
I always say, apply the foliar fertiliser in the afternoon. It gives the plant time to take that nutrient in overnight, so you’re not fighting against the sunlight. All you’re doing is allowing the plant time to take that nutrient into the leaf structure.
So, remember this: foliar fertilization of your crop is really just a top-up for this crop, this season. If you’re going out to spread some urea or some nitrogen fertilizer on, again, it’s a top-up for this plant, this season. And one thing to always remember is, just a little bit often. So, even if you split your foliar application into two applications, it’s sometimes a lot better, and the plant will take it up a lot better. A little often, and a visual response from the fertilizer applications you’ve done. If you can see a response, you know you’ve got a 15 percent response from that application. Even better, if you can’t see that after you’ve done it, maybe it will go into the building of the proteins within the plant, and you’ll get it into the yield of the plant, or you may get it into the quality of the fruit that’s coming forth from there.
So, that’s just a little wrap-up of how to analyze, how to check, how to do your foliar top-ups at this time of the year. Thank you.
Soil Nutrition Final Part
Okay, so that brings us to the last part of our segment, bringing it all together. How does this fit for you? First, we talked about doing a soil test and how to do that. Then we talked about farm planning and how to plan your operation around that. Then we looked at the fertilizer recommendations back after the soil report came back. The next time we looked at the top-up, how we topped up with foliar fertilizer.
Let’s bring all that together and just understand how that all fits. What we’re doing in nutrition is combining energies within the soil within a plant to grow a crop, be it a grain crop, fruiting crops, whatever it is.
Start with the soil, where we started. The soil is just like a battery; it has a positive and negative charge within it. The different elements we have within soils, like your phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, all have a charge within themselves, positives and negatives. Let’s look at that battery that I talked about, which holds this energy within your soil. That’s the carbon levels, and you look at it on your soil test, you see soil carbon. So, what’s carbon really doing? Carbon is an energy source that holds and stores all those nutrients for you.
Think about your car battery, think about soils in balance. We need a good charge within that battery to inspire that backdrop to grow. So, how do we get power back into the soil? It’s through what we call on a soil test, electrical conductivity, and that comes through lightning strikes from the clouds, from the storm clouds that come through, strikes the earth, and adding power to the soil again.
Where’s that energy stored? In the carbon molecules of soil. We look at a soil test, and we see the different levels you have of carbon within soil. So, carbon in itself, then you say, how much is enough? What do we have? How does it work? Within a battery, you have cells, carbon cells, all held within sulfuric acid, positive and negative charge one on each end.
The soils within the Simpson Desert, you say, well, the Simpson, no, it’s just saying, well, it holds 1.5% carbon, but what’s lacking from the Simpson Desert is moisture. So, when the moisture rains come, the wildflowers bloom. So, the carbon energy within soil is held there and stored, activated through moisture to release nutrients into the soil.
Firstly, let’s look at that element, then, carbon. When we plant a little grain or a seed or a seedling into the soil, the first thing that that plant takes is carbon; that’s what it needs to reproduce. It needs that to swell the seed. The next element that that little plant, or that little seedling, takes as it begins to bud and grow, is calcium. Calcium forms the cells so that it can push that little seedling up through the top of the earth. It’s only when it comes up then, starts to put that little root down, does it take phosphorus from the soil.
So, all these elements that I’m talking about, carbon first, calcium, phosphorus, then to push the little root system out and push that little plant up as it breaks forth from the top of the earth. Then it starts to take nitrogen. It takes nitrogen from the soil, brings the energy from the sun, the chlorophyll starts to work, it comes up a nice little green plant, and then it grows from there. Potassium is used in the fruiting side of the plant when it starts to put its fruit on, starts to reproduce and fruit. Sulfur being the formation of proteins and enzymes in this whole process.
Then don’t forget about your micro-elements, your zincs, for example, for cell strength and the structure of the cell. Boron is very much leached out in coastal areas where you have a lot of rain, so you go top up with boron. Boron is the steering wheel that steers all these nutrients throughout the system of the plant. Copper, iron, all very much linking agents within it and the building of chlorophylls within the plant.
So, when we talk about bringing it all together, it’s just the importance of balance within the soil and the leaf structure of the plant, the synergies of one element with another, and the antagonistic of one element with another. It just might be that those elements don’t fit. That’s where a qualified soil agronomist could help you, and an advisor on soil and plant nutrition can help you build a program around for your farm at this time of this year.
So whenever you’re planning something happen, think about it, ask a qualified nutritionist
