We're talking about potato with this 4R stacked best management
practices project.
The four R's has been discussed, and essentially, we'll
looking at this on potato, which is a really
unique crop in a lot of ways.
It's particularly inefficient in nutrient recovery.
And as a result, we get extremely high fertilizer
rates, often double of what we put on most other crops.
And then.
As a result of that, we get some pretty high potential nutrient
pollution rates.
And so we're interested in that from an environmental
perspective as well as for farmers,
not wasting their money and being
able to produce a good crop, is always important to us.
So these nitrogen best management practices--
in fact, we just recently published a book,
Potato Production Systems.
And in that book, I and a couple of co-authors
wrote a chapter on nutrient management for potato,
and we've listed a variety of best management
practices for nitrogen for potato, including,
if we start looking at source, for example,
we want to apply some type of a source that
can help us be more efficient.
We want to use an enhanced efficiency fertilizer product.
I'll talk about that more in a second.
Lots of research, myself, and many others
have done in terms of the right rate.
Potatoes are particularly sensitive.
If we don't get enough fertilizer, like most crops,
we lose yield, but too much nitrogen
can also be pretty detrimental.
There's a fairly narrow window of optimum nitrogen replacement
for nitrogen rate.
Placement-wise, we obviously need
to have that nitrogen in the root zone,
and it's a pretty limited root zone with potato,
and then the right timing.
Potato is, again, particularly sensitive to being
spoon-fed its nitrogen throughout the season.
If I get too heavy of a shot of nitrogen,
it can actually delay tuberization and then
slow things down and affect yields as well
as tuber quality.
So we've got a lot of research on all four of these things,
but in some cases, we have like a source trial with rates.
But we rarely have got a research looking at all four
of these, against stacking these things.
I know, I'm trying to talk about everything,
but I thought I just focus in on some of the sources.
We should start talking about enhanced for efficiency
nitrogen fertilizers.
We split those up into two groups,
slow and controlled-release, and then
the inhibitors and stabilizers.
With the controlled-release, these
are things that are released by physical processes.
For example, some of them are listed here.
In this particular trial, we're using
ESN, which is a polymer-coated urea by Nutrien.
There's some others there that I've worked with,
and others have worked with, too.
We also get slow-release fertilizers.
These are released through chemical or biological
processes, and again, we could have chosen some of these
to focus on.
I've done research on a lot of these, and some of them
are pretty good.
Some of them are less effective, but we've got a lot of data
on those.
We also have these, again, inhibitors, urease inhibitors,
for example.
Lots of good products here.
Nitrification inhibitors.
Again, lots of good products there.
So I just wanted to just put this up there
and say, we're focusing on one source
but we could have chosen a variety of these things.
I really have a lot of experience and confidence
in polymer-coated ureas or ESN products.
I've Just got a lot of research on it.
That's part of why we landed on that particular one.
And just briefly, the way that works
is that you have this urea, and it's
got this polymer that's coated around it.
It prevents that that nitrogen from coming out, right away.
Water moves in, and as that begins
to dissolve in, and the coating, it kind of expands,
and the coating softens over time.
There's a variety of theories on why that happens,
but it ends up, the nitrogen is released,
that controlled fashion, that can be engineered
to release at particular timings,
depending on the thickness of the coating.
And so that's essentially how it works, which the bottom line is
that it presents that fertilizer in that spoon-fed fashion
for my crop, and we've had good luck
with a wide variety of things, ranging from turf grass
to wheat, barley.
So what happens, again, when we start
stacking these BMPs together?
That's what we really need to know,
and the emphasis of this trial.
I'm actually using a reduced or we're
word using a reduced number of treatments in contrast
to what Matt and Jared showed.
We felt like there were some things that have already
been proven just not to be effective with potato,
and so we eliminated those, and are just focusing on these nine
treatments where we're looking again at urea
versus polymer-coated urea.
And we have a control, obviously.
We have some timing placement issues,
essentially looking at applying the nitrogen, all pre-emergent,
or having a split--
a split application that's more of the grower standard
practice.
But the question is, if I'm using polymer-coated urea,
do I really need that?
Is that beneficial or does the spoon-feeding
from the polymer-coated urea eliminate the need
to split the nitrogen?
And then we've got a couple of different rates
that we're looking at, based on some previous research
that we got.
So anyway, we got some--
Here's the field that we're working
with the cooperative at Grace, Idaho, Ryan Christian.
Christian and his family are awesome.
They're wonderful co-operators.
You can see here, that plot right in front
of you, in the foreground is a nitrogen-deficient plot
of that chlorosis, stunting, rows aren't closing compared
to the plot right behind it that's got adequate nitrogen.
Again, when we get nitrogen deficiency,
it's common to have chlorosis, reduced chlorophyll,
we don't get that green color.
It tends to show up in the older leaves first,
because nitrogen is mobile in the plant,
and it tends to move to those new leaves if it's needed.
This is a video.
That's one of my students.
It's going to be his master's project,
and so I'm going to let him talk for a second.
Oops.
I don't know what happened there.
STUDENT: --And today is July [INAUDIBLE]
SPEAKER: Hey, it got better?
STUDENT: We're experimenting with,
here are the four Rs of nutrient management.
That would be the right source, great timing,
and placement of fertilizers.
And as you can see, on my right here,
this is our control treatment that received no fertilizer.
You can tell it's experiencing some chlorosis
through the nitrogen deficiency.
And on my left over here, this is one of our treatments
that did receive fertilizer, and we can see
the plants are a lot healthier.
So the visual symptoms between our treatments
are pretty subtle at this point, but we
expect to see a larger difference as far
as nutrient concentration, once we conduct [INAUDIBLE]
analysis.
SPEAKER: All right.
We've also got some drone imagery of the field.
We can see some differences if we kind of--
Yeah, it's a little early to see too much.
We've got [INAUDIBLE] analysis showing
some differences beginning to appear
in terms of the nitrate nitrogen in those plots,
and we're beginning to see some differences.
A little tough to see too much here,
other than you can pick out those control plots.
This is an MDVI type of an image, where green is healthy,
and red is not healthy.
And you can actually see that those potatoes are not
doing well in those control plots,
and the rows aren't closed, showing up in these images.
So that's about all the results we have so far.
We're anxious to see the rest of this project layout.
Anyway, I think I'm about out of time.
Maybe one minute for ending--