Jozeph du Plessis farms near Schweizer-Reneke in the North West Province of South Africa. Here, he is applying a soybean seeding rate trial with a John Deere 6M125 tractor and John Deere 1755 planter equipped with the Agleader Incommand system. This is the 3rd consecutive season Jozeph is running DIFM trials on his farm. This year’s trial was planted on October 24, 2022.
Divina Gracia P. Rodriguez, David S. Bullock, and Maria A. Boerngen recently published, “The Origins, Implications, and Consequences of Yield-Based Nitrogen Fertilizer Management” in the Agronomy Journal.
Check out their work, now featured on the cover of Crop, Soils, Agronomy News Magazine:
Yield-Based Nitrogen Management
Rules are made to be broken—or at least challenged—even on the farm. The “1.2 Rule” for nitrogen fertilizer application has guided countless agricultural researchers, consultants, extension agents, and farmers for decades. However, some researchers have begun to re-examine the evidence behind it as well as the history of the rule itself.
In an article published recently in Agronomy Journal (http://doi.org/10.2134/agronj2018.07.0479), agricultural economists and agronomists summarized the research that shows the ineffectiveness and harmfulness of the 1.2 Rule and yield-based nitrogen fertilizer management, how the rule came to be, and where the research should go next.
Continue reading this article in CSA News…
DIFM graduate researcher Paula Girón was named one of the International Plant Nutrition Institute’s (IPNI) 31 Scholar Award recipients. The IPNI awards graduate students in countries with an IPNI program in science programs relevant to plant nutrition science and the management of crop nutrients.
Paula Girón is working toward her M.Sc. in soil since at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. She is working on a thesis focusing on site-specific nitrogen management in maize in the northwestern Buenos Aires province. Girón was a visiting scholar with the DIFM project during fall semester of 2016.
