Hi! I'm Daniel Smith, southwest regional agronomist for the
Nutrient and Pest Management Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Today I'm going to be chatting with you about planning effective nutrient applications
via writing a nutrient management plan and updating that plan under higher fertilizer prices.
So there's a lot of benefits to having a nutrient management plan and this is really evident
under years where our margin is a little bit tighter either due to lower crop prices
or due to higher input prices like we're seeing in 2021 and 2022 growing seasons.
So a nutrient management plan can help us take stock of the nutrients that we have on our farm,
it helps estimate our soil and water erosion, helps calculate our phosphorus index, and
calculates a field soil conditioning index. These are all really good metrics that we can use to
judge how we're doing on our farm, if we're losing soil and phosphorus to the environment or not,
and these all have costs so if we can reduce these losses we can help increase our margin, hopefully.
So for example, typically when we write nutrient management plans it's pretty common to see
one to three tons of soil per acre lost in northern farms and three to eight tons of
soil loss per acre in southern Wisconsin by water erosion, if we put an economic value to this that
equates to about twenty dollars a ton. Now think about trying to go out and buy a ton
of soil. Twenty dollars is probably not going to get you a ton of soil delivered to your farm. So
it's a pretty conservative number, we see anywhere from 20 to 160 dollars per acre lost just in soil.
Now if we dive into a nutrient management plan that can help us see how we can reduce
soil erosion on our farm by reducing soil tillage, reducing possible years of crops
grown to include more perennial crops, reduce soil disturbance by harvesting, and that type of thing.
Nutrient management planning we often hear is expensive so are there ways that we can write
these plans ourselves? Absolutely, and it's free to do so! It just takes some time and you do need
to have your own computer that runs windows to do SnapPlus. So contact your local county land
conservation office for more information on this process. You are required to take a class on the
basics of nutrient management planning. However, this is accomplished in several different ways.
There's county and regional-based classes offered by University of Wisconsin-Madison
Extension partners, as well as land conservation offices, and some technical colleges offer classes
for this. You need to learn SnapPlus to write your own nutrient management plan. SnapPlus is a
great piece of software, it's Wisconsin's nutrient management planning tool, and allows us to combine
all of our nutrient sources, soil tests, and plan crop rotations to get some of these metrics
and to calculate how much fertilizer we need to apply/purchase and use via our manure sources. Our
first year writing our own plan we do have to have a locally approved reviewer sign off on the plan
and then we want to review our plan annually and participate in update classes as they're offered.
All of this information provided is for farmers. If you're a certified crop advisor there's a
little bit different process and you have a little bit more freedom to write plans if you take one of
these classes locally. As a farmer, you're only allowed to write plans for acres that you own or
control via rental agreements whereas a certified crop advisor could write plans commercially for
profit. This entire process for most farms is free. You do have to pay for soil testing
which you should be doing anyway, and it takes typically about eight+ hours to start the process
with the classes and then two to four hours every year to update your plan. You will need to have a
Windows operating base computer however you don't need to know how to run SnapPlus, we teach that
and there are plenty of resources to learn via videos online and opportunities locally.
All right, nutrient management plans are not expensive the assumption out there is that they
are. However, they're really an investment in your farm. A 2012 study with 250 Wisconsin farms showed
that 69% of farms saved money with a nutrient management plan with an average savings of $18 per
acre. Soil testing typically cost anywhere from $2 dollars to $7 per acre, so right away in the first
year you paid for your soil testing expense. Then 65% of farms decreased nitrogen applications by an
average of 54 pounds of nitrogen per acre, that equates to approximately $22 an acre,
if you use some early fall prices that could be as high as $26-$27 if you're buying nitrogen
on those later fall prices in 2021. Then 51% of farms decreased phosphorus applications by an
average of 32 pounds per acre. Now everyone says with these reductions what does yield look like,
and the study showed that 74% of farms cited no change in corn yield, and 18% of farms
actually cited an increase in corn yield. By saving money on those nutrients you're able to
allocate nutrients to fields that actually need the nutrients, or crops that actually need the
nutrients like we often see in Wisconsin with alfalfa being short on potash applications.
So how do I use SnapPlus to make good nutrient management decisions and fertilizer decisions?
This is the cropping screen in SnapPlus. So diving into the software itself, and this is a great
screen to look at all your data all at once. This shows all your crops and all your fields
for a current year, along with the soil test data. We move over to the far right-hand side
of the screen, we have University of Wisconsin recommendations. This is over or under application
numbers, so this is a recommendation, and then we have our over/under numbers
on the right-hand side of the screen. So anything with a negative we'd want to look at increasing,
anything that's over that number we'd want to look at decreasing because we want that number to
be right about zero. So for our first field here our recommendations indicate that we need about 40
pounds of P2O5, or phosphorus, and 105 pounds of K2O, or potash. So we can think about allocating
some manure to this field now, if we're thinking about just a blanket strategy of applying manure
to every one of our fields that's not necessarily as efficient as it could be because likely the
fields closest to our farmyard with easy access in the wintertime are already going to be high,
in particular with phosphorus if not potassium as well. So we need to be thinking about
allocating based on crop need to reduce cost and reduce our need for commercial fertilizer
while increasing our yields because we're going to be closer to optimum fertilizer levels.
So what will happen if my plan's not up to date? This is a question that was sent in. You're going
to lose money, and I say that because you're not going to be using the best data to make decisions,
you're going to be making decisions based on soil tests that may be out of date, maybe by
four years. You're gonna have lost opportunities because you may be applying manure for three or
four years to fields that needed it four years ago however they no longer need phosphorus as much as
a couple of your other fields. And then you may have some tax challenges as well by loss of
farmland preservation credits. You have to have a current nutrient management plan on file with
the county in order to receive those important tax documents to turn in when you do your taxes.
So diving into another question. what's the best way to address an over-application of nitrogen
identified in SnapPlus that's identified as a red box on the cropping screen? I'm here for corn
grain, we have 230 pounds applied to this year's fertilizer, it's red because we're 65 pounds
over applied for nitrogen. So we dive into that in a little bit more detail
and that recommendation comes from the MRTN. So this is the system that Wisconsin uses
to get our nitrogen rates, and that's a ratio, so for our particular field that we're looking at
this year nitrogen is approximately $0.91 per pound if you're using a fall-applied
anhydrous ammonia product at approximately $1500 a ton. Our corn price locally for sale
next fall is $5.22 per bushel, that gives us a calculated ratio of 0.17.
We're going to round that 0.17 ratio up to 0.20, so that gives us a University of Wisconsin
recommendation of 150 pounds of nitrogen per acre for our corn grain crop.
Now to make those changes, we double click on that red box that was on that first screen and we can
type in our urea rate, and as you see this is 500 pounds. That's too heavy because we're showing
it's 95 pounds over on this particular screen. We need to make an adjustment there, we just click
on that 500 number and type in the appropriate number to get that number up here closer to zero.
So another question that was sent in is, does my neighbor have a nutrient management plan?
It's maybe, maybe they do maybe they don't. If they're doing really well managing their farm,
controlling soil erosion, controlling nutrient loss, more than likely
acres owned by livestock farms, are going to be under nutrient management planning. That's
not to say that farms that are doing a great job don't have nutrient management plans. It's just
that we more commonly see livestock farms over grain farms, especially in southern Wisconsin,
have a nutrient management plan. It's required for any CAFO farms in Wisconsin and it's required for
certain cost-share programs and local ordinances. Reach out to your local land conservation office
if you want to learn more about nutrient management planning in your neighborhood.
So is there an incentive for specialty crops? This is a pretty common question as well,
and I say yes, there's a larger incentive for increased production and efficiency because
those margins can be a lot more variable. So specialty and vegetable crop production
greatly benefit from nutrient management plans. There's increased cost of production,
and it's increased their incentives to have these,
and the nutrient management plans help allocate expensive nutrients to the right acres,
thus increasing the chance of positive economic returns from all your acres that you farm.
To learn more about these topics the SnapPlus website is a great resource
to go to, to learn how to use SnapPlus, to learn about the resources available,
and then there's this really nice publication put together by the NPM on the benefits of a
nutrient management plan. And that's where some of this data came from for this presentation.
With that please reach out to your local land conservation office for more information on
nutrient management planning locally as well as feel free to reach out via phone and email.
Thank you!