By Brian Hefty

You spend hundreds of dollars per acre to put the crop in.  Don’t forget about the last 5 or 10 bucks!  Micronutrients are inexpensive.  You don’t need to apply many pounds per acre.  However, if you don’t have enough of any micronutrient, that could be the yield-limiting factor in your crop in 2012.

Here are some of the most important micronutrients needed in corn, soybeans, and wheat along with approximately how much each crop needs based on the yield I have listed:

So you look at this chart and say, “That sure doesn’t look like much.”  I agree.  It’s not much.  That’s the problem.  As soon as you think it’s not much, you start to forget about it, but again, if you don’t have enough of any one of these nutrients available for your crop at the right time, your yield could suffer.

Here’s how we suggest you handle this on your farm:

  1. Soil test.  You have no idea what your soil needs unless you pull samples and have them analyzed.
  2. We prefer to apply micronutrients at planting time in-furrow every year.  We like banding so we can recover as many of the applied micros as possible.  Keep in mind this adds some salt, so make sure you’re using a low-salt pop-up fertilizer or a very low rate of a high salt product like 10-34-0.  Use a blended micronutrient product that’s right for the crop to take care of what that crop will remove from the soil.  With a blended product, you have less risk of getting too much or too few micros into each plant, especially if that blend is a liquid or a dry granule that contains each and every micro.  If you use individual dry micronutrients, for example, one plant could get excessive boron while another plant gets excessive iron while another plant gets excessive zinc.  That’s not good.  Excessive is bad, just like deficient is bad.
  3. If you’ve got 1 or 2 micronutrients that are incredibly deficient, apply more of those in addition to the blended product you use each year.  On our farm, for example, we have sidehills that have eroded severely in the past.  Since zinc isn’t very leachable in soil, the zinc moved to the bottom of the hill along with the soil.  Therefore, we have broadcast zinc in those areas, and it has dramatically helped yield.
  4. Use plant tissue analysis to see how you did.  If your tissue samples show low or deficient, you can apply more micros during the season.  Also, this will help you know better what to do for future years.