Feldspar
Member
- Location
- Essex, Cambs and Suffolk
With the Kinsey seminar coming up (which I'm going to) it seems that some people are certainly enthused by the Albrecht soil testing approach.
The academic literature that I have found over the past few months is dead against the Albrecht idea of nutrient ratios, for example the Ca:Mg ratio. The senior soil scientists, such as those at Rothampstead, also dismiss the claims of Albrecht and Kinsey. Looking closely at the published research I do think that all the research published thus far has been flawed because researchers have failed to fully test the soils that they are considering before trying to validate the Albrecht theory. In other words they have judged the Albrecht method through the lens of the availability soil test paradigm and this is creates bias and the results are invalid in my eyes.
The conclusion of which approach is correct seems to me to be of huge importance. For this reason I have had some Albrecht tests taken by a well known UK soil consultancy company and also have sent some further samples directly to the Kinsey labs and am currently working with York (on BFF) who is providing consultancy advice based on the results of the second set of samples. By using two different Albrecht consultants I hoped to learn more by being able to compare the two sets of advice and question discrepancies between the two.
As well as comparing the UK and York's advice I wanted to compare both against standard soil tests. The results came back at the end of last year and I've spent many hours going through them and questioning the meaning of all of the test results. Obviously the standard soil tests are pretty basic, you just get some numbers (1, 2+ etc.) and that's about it. Prima facie it seemed to me that this method really gives very little information about the soil in your fields. It's like trying to summarise a book in one word - you really won't do the full story justice. On this point in particular the Albrecht tests are much more appealing - they satisfy my intuition that soils are very complicated things and one should try and gain as full an understanding as we can without bamboozling ourselves. For example it makes sense to measure total as well as available amounts of things in the soil otherwise one is simply blind when calculating application rates.
The major discrepancy that I have found between the two types of tests (on our soils) is what they say about magnesium. I went to a ProCam day down south where Neil Fuller was speaking. One of his major points was that we should be applying more magnesium than we already are. Why? Firstly because our food is lacking in magnesium and secondly because the the level of magnesium in the soil affects the efficiency of nitrogen uptake into the plant. Kinsey claims that if one has the wrong magnesium level the amount of nitrogen required for a given crop yield is 1.5 times the amount of nitrogen that is needed if the magnesium level is correct. Now Kinsey might be wrong but if there is even the slightest chance that a farm's biggest spend in a year (nitrogen) is being used in a massively inefficient manner then we as farmers ought to be investing a very large amount of effort in validating or disproving this claim.
Standard soils test on our soils give magnesium indicies of around 2 - i.e. not a problem. The Albrecht tests look at the Ca:Mg ratio and say that we have a major magnesium deficiency. The question is who is right? My aim this year is to try and answer this question on our farm. To this end I am in the process of ordering a load of kieserite (among other things) to apply to some of the fields we tested. Application rate will be 263 kg/ha at a cost of around £260 / t. I will be splitting fields in half and will try and measure the yield difference between the two field halves. Obviously I cannot be as scientific and as precise as I'd like but I'm going to do my best. I intend to tissue test both halves of these fields on several occasions throughout the season to see if I can pick up Mg deficiencies in the untreated half and an improvement in the treated half. On a simple level I'd like to see a 0.35 t/ha increase in the treated part.
Some of the fields are also short in potassium according to the York / UK reccs, so I'll be splitting some of the half bits of fields that have received kieserite and will apply potassium sulphate to half of this half-field. Potassium sulphate is much more expensive so a bigger yield response is needed to directly pay back the expenditure.
[A quick note about payback. Supposedly correct nutrition of the plant will mean a healthy plant which is less prone to disease to such an extent that one may be able to reduce fungicide usage and PGRs. It might, therefore, be overly simplistic to look for the above yield response as the only decider. For this year that's what I'm going to do to keep things simple.]
Lastly the Albrecht tests showed a great deal of trace element deficiencies in the soil. To correct these Kinsey and the UK advice recommend applying products containing each of these trace elements. This seemed an onerous task with the need to purchase extra products each with their own application requirements. A much more exciting and appealing solution was proposed by York who explained that micronutrient availability depends heavily on pH - this is not just a Kinsey claim. If we could lower the pH of the soil surrounding the plant's roots then this would make available most of the trace elements (and also phosphates) that were previously complexed / unavailable. If this method works it will be a vastly easier way of solving the trace element problem. The hope is that ammonium sulphate (which has an acidifying effect on the soil) will achieve the above. It has been stressed that the placing of this fertiliser in the rooting zone is important because an ammonium sulphate granule has only ha a LOCAL acidifying effect and so if it were placed on the surface this would be of less use.
Now one might point out the recent talk by the Rothampstead people during the agronomist's conference at the end of last year which concluded that the application of trace element products had not significant effect on yield. Sadly I think this work has some significant flaws. The guy began the talk by talking about Liebig's Law of the Minimum - that is, if you have one thing that is the limiting factor you can change the other factors and you will see no improvement until you remove this other limiting factor. Only if you make the variable you wish to change the limiting factor can you determine its effect on yield. Great, a good thing to mention. The problem was that he then proceeded to ignore this law; in their tests they did a very basic soil test which lacked very much detail. As a result they could not determine what the limiting factor was in their experiments. York likens this situation to someone trying to navigate in a fog without a compass - rather difficult. As a result of their experimental technique they were not in a position to determine whether or not trace element applications are worthwhile or not. Could do better next time Rothampstead!
So to conclude, I hope to try and answer what I think is a very important question, which has not been answered to my satisfaction, by doing some home experiments. Indeed I am amazed that the understanding of proper plant nutrition seems pretty rudimentary in many areas. This question of what a soil should be like to produce the most profitable crops is obviously of an utmost importance. I think, as has been stressed on the BFF, that this is a necessary first step before pushing no-till into our system. I think the aspiration of producing crops with fewer inputs needs not just no-till and cover crops but proper plant nutrition. Indeed I would say that proper nutrition is of greater importance if this aspiration is to be achieved. I will try and post updates of my trials and any results or observations that I make as the year progresses.
The academic literature that I have found over the past few months is dead against the Albrecht idea of nutrient ratios, for example the Ca:Mg ratio. The senior soil scientists, such as those at Rothampstead, also dismiss the claims of Albrecht and Kinsey. Looking closely at the published research I do think that all the research published thus far has been flawed because researchers have failed to fully test the soils that they are considering before trying to validate the Albrecht theory. In other words they have judged the Albrecht method through the lens of the availability soil test paradigm and this is creates bias and the results are invalid in my eyes.
The conclusion of which approach is correct seems to me to be of huge importance. For this reason I have had some Albrecht tests taken by a well known UK soil consultancy company and also have sent some further samples directly to the Kinsey labs and am currently working with York (on BFF) who is providing consultancy advice based on the results of the second set of samples. By using two different Albrecht consultants I hoped to learn more by being able to compare the two sets of advice and question discrepancies between the two.
As well as comparing the UK and York's advice I wanted to compare both against standard soil tests. The results came back at the end of last year and I've spent many hours going through them and questioning the meaning of all of the test results. Obviously the standard soil tests are pretty basic, you just get some numbers (1, 2+ etc.) and that's about it. Prima facie it seemed to me that this method really gives very little information about the soil in your fields. It's like trying to summarise a book in one word - you really won't do the full story justice. On this point in particular the Albrecht tests are much more appealing - they satisfy my intuition that soils are very complicated things and one should try and gain as full an understanding as we can without bamboozling ourselves. For example it makes sense to measure total as well as available amounts of things in the soil otherwise one is simply blind when calculating application rates.
The major discrepancy that I have found between the two types of tests (on our soils) is what they say about magnesium. I went to a ProCam day down south where Neil Fuller was speaking. One of his major points was that we should be applying more magnesium than we already are. Why? Firstly because our food is lacking in magnesium and secondly because the the level of magnesium in the soil affects the efficiency of nitrogen uptake into the plant. Kinsey claims that if one has the wrong magnesium level the amount of nitrogen required for a given crop yield is 1.5 times the amount of nitrogen that is needed if the magnesium level is correct. Now Kinsey might be wrong but if there is even the slightest chance that a farm's biggest spend in a year (nitrogen) is being used in a massively inefficient manner then we as farmers ought to be investing a very large amount of effort in validating or disproving this claim.
Standard soils test on our soils give magnesium indicies of around 2 - i.e. not a problem. The Albrecht tests look at the Ca:Mg ratio and say that we have a major magnesium deficiency. The question is who is right? My aim this year is to try and answer this question on our farm. To this end I am in the process of ordering a load of kieserite (among other things) to apply to some of the fields we tested. Application rate will be 263 kg/ha at a cost of around £260 / t. I will be splitting fields in half and will try and measure the yield difference between the two field halves. Obviously I cannot be as scientific and as precise as I'd like but I'm going to do my best. I intend to tissue test both halves of these fields on several occasions throughout the season to see if I can pick up Mg deficiencies in the untreated half and an improvement in the treated half. On a simple level I'd like to see a 0.35 t/ha increase in the treated part.
Some of the fields are also short in potassium according to the York / UK reccs, so I'll be splitting some of the half bits of fields that have received kieserite and will apply potassium sulphate to half of this half-field. Potassium sulphate is much more expensive so a bigger yield response is needed to directly pay back the expenditure.
[A quick note about payback. Supposedly correct nutrition of the plant will mean a healthy plant which is less prone to disease to such an extent that one may be able to reduce fungicide usage and PGRs. It might, therefore, be overly simplistic to look for the above yield response as the only decider. For this year that's what I'm going to do to keep things simple.]
Lastly the Albrecht tests showed a great deal of trace element deficiencies in the soil. To correct these Kinsey and the UK advice recommend applying products containing each of these trace elements. This seemed an onerous task with the need to purchase extra products each with their own application requirements. A much more exciting and appealing solution was proposed by York who explained that micronutrient availability depends heavily on pH - this is not just a Kinsey claim. If we could lower the pH of the soil surrounding the plant's roots then this would make available most of the trace elements (and also phosphates) that were previously complexed / unavailable. If this method works it will be a vastly easier way of solving the trace element problem. The hope is that ammonium sulphate (which has an acidifying effect on the soil) will achieve the above. It has been stressed that the placing of this fertiliser in the rooting zone is important because an ammonium sulphate granule has only ha a LOCAL acidifying effect and so if it were placed on the surface this would be of less use.
Now one might point out the recent talk by the Rothampstead people during the agronomist's conference at the end of last year which concluded that the application of trace element products had not significant effect on yield. Sadly I think this work has some significant flaws. The guy began the talk by talking about Liebig's Law of the Minimum - that is, if you have one thing that is the limiting factor you can change the other factors and you will see no improvement until you remove this other limiting factor. Only if you make the variable you wish to change the limiting factor can you determine its effect on yield. Great, a good thing to mention. The problem was that he then proceeded to ignore this law; in their tests they did a very basic soil test which lacked very much detail. As a result they could not determine what the limiting factor was in their experiments. York likens this situation to someone trying to navigate in a fog without a compass - rather difficult. As a result of their experimental technique they were not in a position to determine whether or not trace element applications are worthwhile or not. Could do better next time Rothampstead!
So to conclude, I hope to try and answer what I think is a very important question, which has not been answered to my satisfaction, by doing some home experiments. Indeed I am amazed that the understanding of proper plant nutrition seems pretty rudimentary in many areas. This question of what a soil should be like to produce the most profitable crops is obviously of an utmost importance. I think, as has been stressed on the BFF, that this is a necessary first step before pushing no-till into our system. I think the aspiration of producing crops with fewer inputs needs not just no-till and cover crops but proper plant nutrition. Indeed I would say that proper nutrition is of greater importance if this aspiration is to be achieved. I will try and post updates of my trials and any results or observations that I make as the year progresses.
