Overseeding Corn Beats Buying Fertilizer

Overseeding Corn Beats Buying Fertilizer FERTILIZER APPLICATION Fertilizer Application (58f) 34-1-18 Winfred Schmidt makes more money on corn grown without fertilizer than corn grown with it. His secret is overplanting the corn with vetch. While the yield is less than side-by-side plots with 100, 200 or 300 lbs. of 25-15-5 fertilizer added, profits are greater. His no-fertilizer crops are on a three-year rotation with no fertilizer added to any of three crops in the rotation. "Wheat is planted with red clover. The next year soybeans are overplanted with vetch," explains Schmidt. "The next spring the vetch is disked in, and corn is planted. When it's 10 in. tall, it's overplanted with more vetch, which produces fertilizer for the following year's wheat." Schmidt has been maintaining test strips of his plots for 9 years. Each test strip consists of 8 rows of corn, 8 rows of soybeans and 24 ft. of wheat. Fertilizer is broadcast over all three crops in the test strips. "Corn yields are always the highest in the 300-lb. strip, but profits are higher in the 100 and 200-lb. strips and highest of all in the legume overseeded strip," he says. No fertilizer applications have been made to the overseeded strips in 9 years. Schmidt reports not seeing much impact on either wheat or soybean yields between fertilized and non-fertilized strips. All test strips are in the same rotation. Schmidt says the legume impact shows up in more than just profits. "The ground works up better, and you see more earthworms where legumes have been overseeded," he says. At 90, Schmidt is determined to continue experimenting with his fields. He calls it fun farming, since he has retired from full time farming. Schmidt is working on the use of salt to control leafy spurge and a way to improve alkali soils. "I've killed 8-ft. diameter patches of leafy spurge with 38ó worth of salt," he says. "It isn't enough to hurt pasture or cropland, but it kills the roots of the leafy spurge. I am currently playing with a rate of 8 lbs. of salt and 30 gal. of water with some surfactant. A couple patches had a few plants that came back, but in a third patch, the spurge was completely gone." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Winfred Schmidt, 1017 Highway 212, Marietta, Minn. 56257 (ph 320 668-2483).

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