Hypothetically, let’s say you had a really long day (you’re growers and consultants, of course you did.) You were running sun-up to sundown, full throttle, on three cups of coffee and no time for lunch. You are so tired after a shower you can’t even eat. How do you feel the next day? Now imagine you hear there is a lockdown and you’re stuck in your house for a week. What’s in the cupboard, freezer or fridge? How’s that variety of food? What do you have to choose from, canned, dry or frozen?  Now imagine you just received notice the water will only be on once every 10 days, and your storage capacity is limited. How are you going to feel in a month? How about two?

Now imagine you’re a tree. That’s been your life for 6 months; however, you can’t even move around the house. You take what you can get. You are dependent on what the soil may give you and what the grower may supplement it with, but you don’t have much control over it.  What if you want/need calcium but Mr. Grower loaded your soil up with potassium. Now let’s do some math. 

I’ll round off for simplicity: UAN-32 at approximately 10 pounds per gallon. Fifty gallons applied in season. One hundred and fifty-“ish” pounds total weight of nitrogen. We are told 400 pounds of sulfate of potash times 50% K give us the 200 pounds needed for an average crop.  Phosphorous mixed in some sort of glorious triple mix;  at 15%, 20 gallons per season assuming a decent efficacy ought to do it. 30 pounds of P.  Don’t forget the calcium and sulfur: 2 tons of gypsum applied last fall, 4000 pounds, perfect. Let’s say we add 3 tons of compost to the formula. 6000 more pounds.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch of the magic pixie dust that’s in your special mix to give you the farming advantage, but you get the gist. Now let’s compare it to water. Three and a half acre-feet applied, 325,000 gallons of water per acre-foot, 8 pounds of water per gallon. Carry the one, add the decimals, quantum physics and we get 9.1 million pounds of water. 

Rich, what the heck is your point? Counting all the dry mixes and the equivalent weights of the liquid percentages, we applied 10,580 pounds of dry nutrients with 9.1 million pounds of water. A measly 1% of the water weight applied compared to the applied weight of the nutrition, that constitutes a decent portion (20% to 30%) of your farming budget every year.

If you’re religious, and I am, it seems to me the Almighty plays a much bigger role in our crops than the guy recommending the nutrition or even the guy applying it.  Getting it right is very difficult. It often doesn’t take much in the grand scheme of things, and you better have a calculated method to your madness to make it available. 

Nutrient demand curves should play a huge role in what we apply and when. Most of our crops have research on them that can be found online that documents  to the best of our testing ability today what is needed and when. High calcium demand periods will be affected by high application rates of potassium and vice versa. We need calcium all season; however, most of us apply the bulk of it in the fall and hope 10 inches of rain and 3.5 acre-feet of water will make enough available in-season. With 5000 parts per million in the soil on the westside, why are we ever deficient? We are often deficient in P in the spring because we didn’t apply enough postharvest fertility in the fall. P works way better when the soils are warm than in the spring when they are cold. And fertigating through tons of the gypsum that is still on the berms ties up way too much to be effective any time before July!  We don’t need as much at that time anymore. 

Back to the God factor. The microbiologist Dr. Sidhu, who did so much work for decades for us at Ultra Gro, was dedicated to soil health. He came up with strains of biology he showed to be effective for making nutrients more efficient in the soil. He used to call the biology in the soil the “cooks in the kitchen.” The soil was our kitchen. Nutrients were the groceries. Carbon was the pots and the pans. Enzymatic reactions were the recipes. Mother Nature makes those cooks so much more effective if the recipes have exactly what they need, in the amounts they need at the right time. Since trees can’t move, we must make the wetting patterns (where the roots are concentrated) more balanced to the needs of the trees at that physiological time. That takes a plan.

Plan for greater solubility of the nutrients you will need in-season at the proper time the trees need it. Sometimes, that means applying one nutrient foliarly while applying another through fertigation. I recommend adding prebiotics and probiotics to your soil after detrimental applications like pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Changing the pH of the water during or immediately after a fertility application may help solubilize specific cations to make them available. Don’t forget to change your irrigation schedule as well to keep that nutrition in the root zone longer. This should allow you to do more with less. Get targeted and efficient. Keep those cooks in the kitchen happy and add more if the workload heats up. If you have everything you need, being stuck in a comfortable spot may not be all that bad.