Zach Scherf
Member
I live on a small dairy in indiana that seems to keep getting bigger. I"m 21 and own all my own equipment from my milking pay I"ve saved. I make all the hay (about 400 big rounds and 1000 small squares.) for our farm and do all the manure hauling field work ect. We never ventured into row crop much, I usually keep 15 or 20 acres in corn or beans. I know a lot about making hay and have the basics down on row crops, but I want to learn how to grow better yielding crops. I have a local co-op that supplies our fertilizer and some of our seed. We use lots of Dairyland seed and Byron forages. The seeds aren"t the problems, I can get good emergence. It"s the fertility that I want to master. To be honest we probably don"t fertilize our ground as we should, but it"s limed well. Where can I learn about fertility in a practical manner? I want to be able to look at a soil test and be able to know what I should put on to make a profitable crop. Not the biggest crops necessarily. It seems like when we follow our co-ops suggestions we always put out more than what we get back from that fertilizer. I know they know what their talking about but sometimes feel they may push the application rates up to make more money, after all they sell the fertilizer. I guess all in all I"m asking how did you learn to calculate fertilizer inputs? Is there a college text book that would help? I read one about soils but it was very dry and only contained the technical material ( ions in the soil soil particles ect.) sorry for being so long winded and I know it varies a lot by climate and soil type. We farm mostly clay with some sand fields.