Timely Topics: Customizing Your Fertilizer Applications in Relations to Weather
Timely Topics: Customizing Your Fertilizer Applications in Relations to Weather
Contributed by Dr. Thomas Jensen, Director, IPNI North American Program
Don’t forget the weather experienced during a crop year has the greatest effect on crop yields. Crops need sunlight, warmth, moisture, and nutrients to grow. When crops are grown under rain fed conditions, the only need we can supplement is nutrients by adding fertilizers and livestock manures as appropriate.
Access to irrigation allows addition of water if moisture is in short supply, but we can’t do much if rainfall is excessive. The reality is that farmers are at the mercy of the weather. Most of the time the weather is conducive to reasonably good crop production, but sometimes we receive insufficient moisture, and or warmth, and crop yields are poor.
In contrast there are those extraordinary crop years when all the crop needs are supplied in just the right combination. For example, 2013 was an example of one of those extraordinary crop years, as experienced in the Western
Canadian Prairie provinces. In Alberta the average yield of all wheat types was over 58 bu/A. This is the highest average wheat yield experienced from 1962 through to 2013. The average for the previous 9 crop years, 2004 through 2012, was just over 45 bu/A, so considering the past 10 years the 2013 crop year was 29% higher yielding than the average of the previous 9 years.
