44 Story Idea?Email Paul.Nolan@Farms.com Better Farming | November 2023 crops: yield matter$ PLANT TISSUE REVIEW ON CORN Evaluating nutrient de ciencies & uptakes. By Dale Cowan I’ve taken another look at our 2023 plant tissue results on corn and summarized the percentage of samples that were analyzed as de cient in various essential nutrients. We sampled the ear leaf prior to pollen shedding. e rst obvious question. Do any of the de ciencies matter? e reason we do tissue analysis is to assess the nutrient uptake of the crop and compare those values to known critical values. If the values analyzed are below the critical values, then the likelihood exists that yields will be impacted. We can see that 28 per cent of the samples were de cient in nitrogen (N). No real surprise considering some of the elds sampled had received 17 inches of rain prior to this growth stage. We do know that the applied N was not deemed to be too low for the yield goal that was determined. e excess rainfall to some degree can explain 45 per cent of the samples de cient in sulphur as sulphate sulphur, like nitrate nitrogen, is mobile in the soil and can move below the root zone. at is not the whole story as sulphur is not yet universally applied to corn. It could simply be an outright de ciency in some elds due to lack of supply. Boron was de cient in 52 per cent of the samples but that depended on which critical level I used. At six ppm, it was 52 per cent of samples, and at 10 ppm, it was 90 per cent of the samples. e very rst article I wrote for Better Farming was on boron. We did several eld trials and observed a ve-bushel per acre response N = 38 Nutrient % of samples de cient Nitrogen Sulphur Potassium Magnesium Boron Zinc 28 45 8.5 80 52 20 Improving your crop yields takes a little trial and error. Paul Nolan photo
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