Wooddust

all points well made, and well taken.

The key from my viewpoint is that you are dealing with this on a near laboratory level...simple replacement of N in almost any soil is more than adequate. Antything beyond that on a commercial scale is environmentally unsound, economically a loss, and agronomically imprudent based on any study of marginality of return beyond replacement levels.

Application of Commercial Farm level technology in a food plot situation is asking far too much from people with limited understanding of the key principals and I think its more important to advocate use less, not more, patience not chemical assistance, and diversity in feed sources that are both appropriate for the situation as well as low impact on the environment.

Dan O.

Wooddust; there is one case where excess fertilizer is good. It' s so silly that I missed it because I' ve been doing it for almost 20 years. When I moved to my present property the soil had been cropped heavily and clean cultivated for orchards until there was almost no organic matter left. You could have made bricks out of the red clay that was my top soil. If you put a shovel in the soil in the spring you got one large clump of clay. If you let the clump dry you' d need a sledge hammer to break it apart. For most of the 20 years I' ve gone with no tillage, mowing, and fertilizing management. I' ve intercropped alfalfa and clover but everything between the tree rows is finely chopped when mowed and left in place. You can actually put a shovel in the soil now and remove a slice that breaks apart. The soil is now brown. This has been done by adding fertilizer in excess of the tree crop requirements. The excess is used by the grass and converted from inorganic to organic form. The clippings then break down to humus and it' s like putting money in the bank against future fertilizer needs.

If you added an excess of nitrogen fertilizer to a bare cultivated row crop you' d be asking for trouble.

Dan O.

farm hunter

Thank you both - That is exactly the information that I was looking for.

Where our corn is planted - (the whole 15 acre field) Active farming stopped in 1983 I think - and the soils were left in pretty bad shape by the renter. We started clover and corn here in 1998 - so it layed fallow 15 years. The soil is very heavy and was very low in orgaing matter.

The other field we plant corn in - we had planted Rye in it since 1989. We planted 5 acres of rye here to attract deer for about ten years before we started corn - the soil difference and N requirements are completely different - even though the Ph and N-P-K needed is similar according to the soil tests. I think Dan has a pretty good point - I do not think there is much doubt that The ragweed problem in the field has hurt too. We started rotating corn this year a bit. I think that will help alot. (along with roundup ready corn next year -I think we' ll do a bag of both.).

Thanks again -