John Kempf explains why fall is the right time to start managing crop nutrition. Soil microbes need months to break down residues and mobilize minerals, so applying microbial inoculants in fall ensures nutrients are ready when plants need them in spring, whether you grow perennials or are switching away from soluble fertilizers.
Chapters
Hi, friends. 60 or 70 years of farming with heavy use of chemical fertilizers and relying on soluble nutrient inputs has gotten us used to the idea that we can start with our fertilizer applications in the spring, that we can plant a seed in the ground and we can apply fertilizers. The crop is going to take off and grow and everything will be fine. If we're growing perennial crops, we know that starting in spring is the wrong time to begin because the this year's crop is actually determined last year, while last year's fruit was sizing. So if we're growing strawberries or grapes or apples, we know that we need to manage last year's nutrition in order to manage and to produce this year's crop and to produce a healthy, high quality crop in this year. We tend to not think about that being the case for annual crops, but it is, particularly if we want to move away from a dependency on soluble fertilizers. If we want our soil to deliver nutrition for a growing crop, that process of nutrient delivery is a microbial process, and biology needs time to build up its populations and to extract minerals from the soil mineral matrix and make them available to the following crop. For this reason, when we are working with soil biological populations to deliver nutrients and to grow really amazing crops, we have to start with our nutrition management in the fall, not in the spring. When we begin in the spring, we're still able to produce some very nice crop responses, but we are really behind the eight ball and we're not starting from the best place. So for these reasons, it is most valuable for us to put on microbial inoculants and any microbial stimulants that are needed to generate very vigorous active microbial populations in the fall, so that we can break down crop residue, if that is needed or useful, so that we can solubilize the organic materials that are in the soil profile and make them available in the following spring for the crop that we are planting. If you think about it, this natural seasonal cycle, this is the reason why first cutting alfalfa grows so vigorously, so much more vigorously in the spring than later cuttings throughout the year. It's not just that it has more moisture, although that can also be a contributing factor, but it's because of this flush of available nutrients you want. And here's the key part. These nutrients are very available for plants to absorb, but they're not water soluble. They don't leach, they don't disappear, they don't move away. So if we want to provide good nutrition for our crops that can sustain a crop through the entire season. We need to establish robust microbial populations in the fall and have them work at releasing nutrients throughout the entire season, throughout the entire winter, and then be available to get those plants off to a very strong start the following spring. So this is why crop management and nutrition management doesn't really begin in the spring. In a biological system, it begins the fall before we are actually planting our crop. So we've been able to produce tremendous soil microbial responses and crop responses with our soil primer application of Rejuvenate and Spectrum. This combination has become one of our most popular products that gets used on almost all that gets used on all the acres that we work on for the very simple reason that it delivers visual results consistently. You can see where it has been applied and you can observe the crop response where it has been applied. So please connect with us at Advancing Eco Agriculture and have a conversation about the benefits that soil primer can bring for you. We would love to see it work on your fields. Thank you.
