John Kempf explains how to manage nutrients in crops like cotton, soybeans, and tomatoes that flower over weeks instead of days. Calcium works with boron, potassium with manganese. Get manganese right and plants regulate their own potassium uptake, letting you push calcium for better quality and profit.
Chapters
This is easy, relatively easy to manage these nutrient release curves on crops where you have a compressed flowering and pollination window, on tree fruit, for example, or on small grains crops, or grains crops, where you have all the blossoming and pollination happening within a couple of week window. But what happens if you're dealing with a crop that has extended bloom and pollination periods, such as cotton or soybeans or tomatoes or watermelons or something like that? Because now you have embryos, small fruit and blossoms all the same plant at different stages of development. And so the key to managing that relationship is with trace minerals. So calcium, we know, has a synergistic relationship with boron. Potassium has a synergistic relationship with manganese, and not magnesium, but manganese. And our experience has been that the plants prefer, given the opportunity, plants will homeostatically balance nutrients. Now, the key to that phrase is given the opportunity, that means two things. One is they need to be in not such a nutrient rich environment that they absorb nutrients, even though they might desire not to. And secondly, it means they need to have the nutrients, the other minerals that allow them to homeostatically regulate nutrients. So manganese is that element for potassium when plants have adequate levels of manganese. Our experience suggests that with adequate levels of manganese, even when soils have higher levels of potassium, or even in the case of perennial trees, like tree and nuts with the trunk and branches is loaded with an abundant level of potassium, as long as the plant has generous levels of manganese, it will regulate to some degree the amount of potassium that will move into this developing embryo. And so you can down regulate potassium and upregulate calcium by managing boron and manganese at this very critical period. This is one of the foundational concepts that has allowed us to make such a significant difference in improving economic outcomes and crop quality outcomes for the farms that we are managing agronomy for.
