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New nitrogen tool – N Vision Ag
Central Missouri field. On right, corn got all its nitrogen before planting. More than 15″ rain April – June. On left, N was re-supplied and out-yielded corn on the right by upwards of 60 bushels.
A new tool for managing nitrogen loss hit the market this week. Peter Scharf, a nutrient management professor at the University of Missouri, has developed a tool called “N Vision Ag” to help growers decide whether they need more nitrogen fertilizer, It uses aerial images.
Scharf tells Brownfield Ag News, it’s “$2 for the photo, $4 for the yield loss map and prediction and $4 for the nitrogen control file. So, the most you’re going to spend is $10. If you look at the photo and see no problem you’ve only spent $2 and you’ve saved yourself the possibility of putting $40 or $50 worth of rescue nitrogen onto a field that didn’t need it.”
Patchy nitrogen loss in a central Iowa cornfield in 2008
Scharf says N Vision Ag has been years in the making and grew out of the problems farmers have faced with too much moisture, especially from 2008 through 2011. Scharf tells Brownfield, “The people who had it the worst during those four years was right where Illinois, Iowa and Missouri come together, up in the 50 to 80 miles from Keokuk (Iowa), in that radius. They got it all four years of having that kind of wet and they had a heck of a time with supplying nitrogen to their corn and keeping the supply that they had put on, there.”
And Scharf says this is another year of too much rain and nitrogen losses in much of the Corn Belt.
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