Do you fertilize your soybeans? If I ask most farmers this question, the answer I commonly get is “no, I overfertilize my corn crop, and my soybeans use the leftovers”. My follow up question to this is…are you happy with your soybean yields? Here again, most farmers say “no”. I would suggest to you that there may not be enough nutrients in your soil to feed your plants. Consider this.
Here is approximately what a 60-bushel soybean crop uses to produce the grain and the stover. These are ACTUAL UNITS of each nutrient. So for example, if you raise a 60-bushel soybean crop and leave the stover in the field, when you remove the grain from the field you have just taken off 84 units of potassium. To get 84 units of potassium by applying potash (0-0-60), you’d need 140 pounds of potash PER ACRE!

I have 2 main points I want you to think about with this article:

1) Are you getting ahead or falling behind in your fertility program? If you are not fertilizing your soybeans AND you are disappointed in your yields, maybe there’s a connection there.

2) We use a blended micronutrient product in soybeans at a low rate each year on our farm. As you can see in this chart, you don’t need many micronutrients, but if your soil doesn’t have enough, yield will suffer.

Fertility is extremely important. It’s the food your crop needs to grow. On our farm our soybean yields started going up considerably when we started looking closer at what our yield goals were and what our crops were actually removing from the soil. If you don’t replenish what you’ve removed AND make sure your soil has the right balance of available nutrients for your yield goals, you’ll never consistently get the high yields you should. Finally, if you want to monitor whether or not your crop is ACTUALLY getting enough plant food, run plant tissue analysis during the growing season. It’s cheap. It’s easy, and it’s made our farm thousands of dollars since we
started doing it a few years ago. We’ll talk more about plant tissue analysis next month.