Soil organic matter

All right, now to our video of the week and a highlight from Brian Hefty's strip-till conference presentation.

The Ag PhD co-host shared 16 things he pays attention to on a soil test, starting with soil organic matter.

Nitrogen.

Everybody this year said, well, the nitrogen prices went sky high.

And what do I do? How do I cut? What should I do with this? The number one thing your fertilizer dealer isn't telling you is this right here.

For every 1% of soil organic matter, Your soil is releasing for free every single year a whole bunch of nitrogen, phosphate, and sulfur.

So for example, if I had 5% organic matter soil, we're going to get 100 to 150 free pounds of nitrogen every single year.

And if you don't factor that in, you're over applying your nitrogen.

So it helps with a range of things and it helps with sodicity as well.

How are those two factors of sodicity and salinity disrupting that cycle of carbon and soil organic matter for the listeners just to get a sense of the cycle?

As constraints, they limit plant growth and that therefore just puts a bit of a park on the input.

And we talked earlier about the flux of organic matter through the system is what's the important thing.