Joe Osterhaus, Sales Agronomist • June 12, 2018

Side-Dress and Foliar Opportunities

We are now moving into June and Mother Nature has had her fun delaying planting in some parts of the country. I talked with people from the north ( i.e. Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota) a week ago and they were just wrapping up corn planting due to wet conditions. Across the corn belt most crops are growing and really looking pretty good. Recent rains have been very welcome here in Nebraska and Iowa.

Producers are side-dressing nitrogen and post spraying herbicides. I have been promoting NACHURS K-fuse with side-dress nitrogen applications and NACHURS Finish Line with post herbicide applications at 1 qt per acre. NACHURS K-Fuse is a 6-0-12-12 formulation of NACHURS Bio-K and sulfur. This was developed to mix with UAN at concentrations higher than you could with products like potassium thiosulfate. In some areas of the country our soil’s potassium and sulfur levels have been dropping over the last 20 + years. Research is showing that this combination of Bio-K and sulfur along with proprietary ingredients has been boosting yields and could be the next step to consistently reaching ever closer to 300+ bu/A.

NACHURS Finish Line is an 8-4-6 (NPK) with boron, copper, manganese and zinc. This NPK and micronutrient combination gives your crops the boost they need at important times during the growing season. We use fully chelated micronutrients so that they don’t get tied up with chemical bonds from crop protection products. This product mixes easily with a wide variety of crop protection has been on the market for 4 years with a proven, positive return on investment. Foliar feeding works despite what you may hear from various universities. New technologies and plant available forms of nutrients have made NACHURS Finish Line a virtual no brainer. Don’t miss the opportunity to add to the top end of yields.

There are always challenges when it comes to farming. We face these challenges every year by having a plan and trying to limit the variables that we encounter. At NACHURS we are continually working to find new efficient ways to make the best technologically advanced fertilizer in the industry. There is a difference. NACHURS has products you can believe in.


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As I travel across Canada, it has been great to see moisture along much of my path. Greener pastures and ditches in Alberta, lush spring wheat, durum, and lentil crops in Saskatchewan, as well as many triticale, grass, and alfalfa fields, are being cut from British Columbia to Nova Scotia. I do not want to forget those potatoes spread across our country along with many specialty crops. As heat and moisture have brought germination, emergence, and vegetation growth, our crop nutrient management remains a key to success as we monitor the “Points of Influence.” Crop scouting, accompanied by tissue or sap samples, supports crop-based crop protection and foliar nutrient applications. As we have been programmed to concentrate on nitrogen, we are putting a lot of pressure on one nutrient to solve many deficiencies and concerns while ignoring the balance of fertility our crops may be looking for. In this blog post, I will not cover all the nutrient requirements but concentrate a little on magnesium, as I refer to what makes plants green. This spring, a significant amount of discussion surfaced around magnesium, and several growers requested magnesium for their cropping plans. Sometimes, what is new is old; looking back, magnesium has been a big part of many crop plans for decades. In sandy soils, specialty crops, and our high calcitic soils, we are looking to balance our oxygen and moisture space in soil levels. To better understand what we are looking at, I have included a list of what Mg is responsible for as well as soil activity stated: Magnesium Crops require magnesium to capture the sun's energy for growth and production through photosynthesis. Magnesium is an essential component of the chlorophyll molecule, with each molecule containing 6.7 percent magnesium. Magnesium also acts as a phosphorus carrier in plants. Necessary for cell division and protein formation. Phosphorus uptake could not occur without magnesium, and vice versa. Magnesium is essential for phosphate metabolism, plant respiration, and the activation of several enzyme systems.