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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 02 2019, @08:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the sounds-like-politics dept.

We've all heard about the magical combination of being in the right place at the right time. Well for fertilizer, it's more accurate to say it should be in the right place at the right rate. A group of Canadian scientists wanted to find the perfect combination for farmers in their northern prairies.

When farmers place fertilizer on a field, they'd like it to stay there. However, water that runs off a field can take some of the valuable fertilizer with it. In Canada this water can take two forms: rainfall runoff or snow melt. It's the latter type of water—snow melt—that causes the most runoff losses in the Canadian prairies.

Knowing how each form of runoff affects fertilizer will impact their "right place, right rate" calculation. Rainfall runoff and snow melt runoff may result in different fertilizer management recommendations. So, Jeff Schoenau from the University of Saskatchewan and his team focused on runoff from snowmelt.

"This work contributed to finding better practices for phosphorus fertilization," Schoenau explains. "These will help growers in the northern prairies make better use of their fertilizer. By applying the fertilizer in the right place at the right rate, growers can greatly lower the phosphorus loss from snowmelt runoff."

[...] "In order to encourage growers to follow the best practices, it's important to document and understand why and how a specific practice like the one we tested works," he says. "I am both a scientist and farmer on the prairies interested in furthering the environmental and economic sustainability of our modern cropping systems."

[...]More information: Jordan T. Wiens et al, Potential Phosphorus Export in Snowmelt as Influenced by Fertilizer Placement Method in the Canadian Prairies, Journal of Environment Quality (2019). DOI: 10.2134/jeq2018.07.0276


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 02 2019, @10:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 02 2019, @10:54PM (#838173)

    Point them to your field, tell them it's a road, and watch them place fertilizer exactly where you need it.

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