We’ve all heard about the magical combination of being in the right place at the right time.
We’ve all heard about the magical combination of being in the right place at the right time. Well for fertilizer, it’s more accurate to say it should be in the right place at the right rate. A group of Canadian scientists wanted to find the perfect combination for farmers in their northern prairies.
When farmers place fertilizer on a field, they’d like it to stay there. However, water that runs off a field can take some of the valuable fertilizer with it. In Canada this water can take two forms: rainfall runoff or snowmelt. It’s the latter type of water – snowmelt – that causes the most runoff losses in the Canadian prairies.
Knowing how each form of runoff affects fertilizer will impact their “right place, right rate” calculation. Rainfall runoff and snowmelt runoff may result in different fertilizer management recommendations. So, Jeff Schoenau from the University of Saskatchewan and his team focused on runoff from snowmelt.
“This work contributed to finding better practices for phosphorus fertilization,” Schoenau explains. “These will help growers in the northern prairies make better use of their fertilizer. By applying the fertilizer in the right place at the right rate, growers can greatly lower the phosphorus loss from snowmelt runoff.”
Read more at American Society of Agronomy
Image: The soil slabs that were used in simulated snowmelt runoff studies were removed from the field plots by the researchers. (Credit: Photo by T. King.)
