Having been in the fertilizer business for over 30 years in Western Canada and involved in the promotion of innovative technologies such as direct seeding and variable rate application I had become interested in the potential of precision placement that applies fertility directly to the plant.

More often than not, growing conditions in Western Canada including cold seeding conditions and less than ideal soil quality can interfere with nutrition uptake of the plant. This affects not only the performance of nutrition in the soil but also has an often significant impact on the farm producers’ ability to manage his operations. Where crop rotation and operational timing are critical to the harvest, especially machinery and labour costs are driven up and production reduced.

Alpine produces high quality nutrition that that may be precisely applied directly to the plant on a staged basis from seeding through to foliar application.

These practices are being realized by farm operations such as Fabian Seed Farms (www.fabianseedfarms.com) of Tilley Alberta. They are using staged (phased) nutrition with Alpine programs to get to the next level of production on their farm. Their operation includes rotations of crops such as Wheat, Barley, Corn, Soybean, Flax, Tillage Radish, and Sorghum.

They have a complete Phazed Nutrition Program including ALPINE G22 and micronutrients in the seed row and staged foliar application of same in order to balance nutrition in their seed production. This has been yielding unexpected results with seed customers. Comments such as faster and more even emergence of their seed and the “line in the field” are being returned to Fabian.

Patrick Fabian has stated “… the reason I like liquid is the fact every plant can get attention with the liquid system immediately the year of application, rather than waiting 5, 6 or more years to see a benefit as you are “investing”, but seeing no tangible benefit, and consequently one can assume a return. . You can’t do that with dry on micros. Not only that, once you are in the “liquid frame of mind”, you can fine tune your fertility even further with foliar applications at herbicide time and at fungicide time, based on the results from tissue tests on the crop. You can’t do that with dry either. It is a total approach, and it usually starts in the seed row.”

Alpine has placed a field trail at the Fabian Farm to test the yield limits of Barley on irrigation without sacrificing quality. Balanced nutrition is being applied to the plant at all critical grow stages. Fabian Farms have begun an annual crop tour event to demonstrate these efforts that may be found at:

Keith