Thursday, March 28, 2024

FROM THE RIDGE: It will never get any better than this

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My new Ballance fertiliser rep or nutrient specialist, as they are now called, James Logan asked “What are you doing tonight?”
Reading Time: 3 minutes

We had just finished doing my bi-annual soil sampling and a couple of herbage samples for good measure.

“It’s column night so right on my deadline, as usual, I’ll be tapping away on that.”

“What will you be writing about then?”

“That’s a very good question James. I don’t know, as is usual. Perhaps I might write about soil sampling and the results over the years.”

And why not?

Before we started I’d shown young James my soil sampling folder going back decades.

It has the results of about 20 rounds of soil sampling and about 10 different advisers.

The earliest entry was from my father’s day. His then farm adviser Brian Robertson took some herbage samples way back in 1974. I later met Brian at Lincoln in the early 1980s. In his letter Brian was very pleased with the copper levels and the potash, magnesium, manganese and molybdian were adequate. He says he’d like to do clover samples every month to note seasonal variations but history doesn’t record whether pursued that enthusiastic idea.

The next sheet is one from my first year here in 1983, done by Doug Henderson from the East Coast Fertiliser Company. He was very pleased with the PH as we had used a lot of lime from the nearby Hatuma limeworks. But he was quite concerned about the phosphate levels and quite rightly because they were in low single figures and recommended a fair bit of superphosphate, which we did for a couple of years.

My mate Alan Barr, who sadly died a few years ago, was my Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries farm adviser and the soil sampling he and I did together in 1985 showed an improvement of Olsen P to the low teens.

But the rural recession struck not long after and the subsequent test results over the next 12 years show I was able only to hold the phosphorus levels in the mid teens and sulphur levels remained very modest. On my soil type sulphur has remained modest despite a lot of application. It goes on, it gets used and lost quite quickly.

Through this time with low lamb prices and a relatively high super cost I needed 10 to 12 lambs to buy a tonne.

But that changed dramatically in the early 2000s when sheep meat prices finally recovered and with a lower dollar fertiliser got cheaper and three or four lambs would buy a tonne. Now it’s only two prime lambs required. It will never get better than that. This seemed too good an opportunity to let pass and I put on a lot of capital fertiliser.

My rep at the time, Euan Talbot, wrote several reports enthusiastically plotting the progress of our plan to lift fertility over the farm.

I’d always subscribed to the farm consultants’ advice of good subdivision with a reticulated water supply, which I’d put in place and now I was able to lift fertility to the economic and biological optimums in the mid to high 20s quite quickly.

Once there from the late 2000s, phosphate stopped being the limiting factor and I’ve been able to improve sulphur and potassium levels.

And has this career-long investment in increasing fertility been worthwhile?

Yes, it has. Certainly, I get more pasture grown during the year, better performance in the shoulder seasons when feed grows for longer and an improvement in feed quality which often gets overlooked. More clover fixing more nitrogen provides quality feed for the livestock.

This spring has been a terrific clover season and my stocking rate has been too conservative to control the feed grown.

After James and I took the herbage samples I asked if we were going to have to sit down somewhere and select out the clover for the sampling we planned for the micronutrient testing as I’d done in the past.

I was delighted to hear that some soul in the lab now had that job.

So, he went home and I came back to write a column.

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