Nitrogen prices are volatile, but cutting back reflexively can hurt yields. Many farms over-apply anyway and could reduce inputs without losing crops. The speaker covers nitrogen efficiency through the AEA program, treating it as one energy source among soil carbon and other nutrients.
Chapters
Welcome again, everyone. Glad to have you. I feel privileged to be with so many people to have this conversation about how we can use nitrogen more efficiently. Or maybe better stated, because it seems like nitrogen efficiency has become a bit of a hype. How can we have production profitability and consistency of profitability year in and year out and not be dependent on, or as dependent on nitrogen inputs? I've been intrigued how many nitrogen efficiency webinars that have come across in advertisements and so forth in the last couple weeks. It just seems like that's all people are talking about. So here we go. We're going to talk about it too, but we're going to talk about the hype of it. And no, not really. I just find it interesting that when nitrogen prices went up, everybody started talking about nitrogen efficiency. And I think it's a very good thing, actually. I think when we stop to consider why do we use nitrogen, and are we getting from nitrogen what we're paying for it, it will really help us to take a good, solid look and make good, solid decisions in our programs. So let's dive right into the webinar. Today we're gonna focus a bit on efficiency. Just think about efficiency and how it applies to our operation, to your operation. So as we go through these, these efficiency slides, I'd like for you to just think about, where are you in your operation? Are your inputs as efficient as possible? Where do you find yourself in that? Then we'll talk about the AEA nitrogen efficiency program, how it works, and we'll look at the big picture of nitrogen cycle, which is where you really need to be focusing on. Is nitrogen critical for your success? I think a lot of people in conventional agriculture have become dependent on nitrogen. And as we can see here, looking at this graph we see on the left where 2008 nitrogen prices spike, in 2012, they drop back down. And now we're back. This is actually just to December 2021. So this has gotten even worse. So what happens when nitrogen prices are up? What happens when nitrogen prices are down? It tends to be that whenever the prices are down, people tend to put more on, and when they're up, people put on less. The question is, is that profitable? Is that sustainable? Is that what is going to help you win and be successful and have a successful operation to pass on to the next generation? Because if you just cut back, not putting on enough, as you can see by this picture, can be a problem. If you don't have enough power, if you don't have enough energy to grow that crop, Then there's going to be an issue. Now, when we think about energy and we think about plants energy, people quickly relate that to nitrogen. And while nitrogen is a very strong growth energy, there are many other nutrients that are important to have in balance in order to grow a very healthy and so build soil at the same time, if we're growing a very and at the same time we're burning off carbon and organic matter, then not a good thing. So just because nitrogen prices are up, I would caution you to not just drop your nitrogen because you might drop it too low or you might not have enough nitrogen to accomplish the job. On the flip side, maybe you've been applying way too much nitrogen for what is needed to get the job done, and you can cut back substantially and still have plenty of power to get the job done. Pulling a little camper with a semi trailer, if you're traveling across the US Touring the US that's not a very efficient way, right? So in this scenario, you'd be able to cut way back on your energy and still have plenty to accomplish the job. And that's really where a lot of people find themselves, is they've been applying too much nitrogen and so they're able to cut way back and still have enough nitrogen to accomplish the job. Or maybe you're using about the right amount of horsepower or energy or nitrogen input, or you have been in the past and you'd like to still cut back. There's things that you can do to help make sure that you don't cut back too far or that you still have enough energy or nitrogen to grow a healthy. Some people like to fill their tank when they're traveling. Let's say on a road trip, they fill their tank once, they don't want to stop a tank.
