COLUMN | NEWS | FEATURE
STUDYING STABILIZERS BY: KELLI SCHRAG, MKC COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST
To side-dress or not to side-dress, that is the question. While it may not be as profound of a phrase as Shakespeare’s famous line, it is a common musing in farmer’s minds each year. Farmers face several options when it comes to addressing nitrogen loss, such as broadcasting urea, streaming UAN at a flat or variable rate, running UAN with drop hoses at flat or variable rates, or doing nothing at all. Last spring, MKC Strategic Account Manager Mike Zacharias partnered with Burns-area farmer John Taylor to conduct the study “To Side-Dress or not to Side-Dress: A Study in Optimizing Profitability for Dryland Corn Using Various Management Practices,” using Taylor’s fields. “Butler County was unseasonably wet during the spring of 2019,” Zacharias says. “Consequently, fields planted to corn sustained widely varied nitrogen losses. A combination of soil type, topography, fertilizer sources and management practices all played roles in what nitrogen still remained in the soil.” Taylor had applied liquid nitrogen to his fields earlier in the season, but because of the large amount of rainfall, his fields were now nitrogen deficient. “I knew I needed to do something,” Taylor says. “Things change on a year to year basis, but I’ve been in this position before and was open to trying something new.” Zacharias used the unique year as an opportunity to experiment and get creative in studying various
John Taylor (right) and Strategic Account Manager Mike Zacharias scout fields to compare what they see on the ground with what they were seeing from satellite imagery.
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management practices. He first looked at how to determine which fields needed additional nitrogen and then how to identify specific nitrogen needs for a given field. “Our plan was truly a joint effort between John and several MKC employees,” Zacharias says. “Our precision ag team utilized the Winfield United R7 tool and Bayer’s Climate platform to access a wide variety of satellite images and write variable rate side-dress scripts.” Zacharias and Taylor scouted fields to compare what they saw on the ground with what they were seeing from satellite imagery. They went field by field, referencing historic yield performance with observations to create a targeted approach for each field. “We spent a lot of time discussing what we wanted to do,” Taylor says. “Mike helped mesh together what we were seeing in the field and from the images to formulate a plan.” The team decided to run with two strategies: flat rate stabilized UAN and variable rate UAN application with stabilizers, with the goal to gain additional bushels and earn a positive return on those acres. “We did a lot of looking at the forecast and current conditions, and weighed which stabilizer was going to give him the most bang for his buck,” Zacharias says. “We were hoping to move the fields that we were applying variable rate UAN to a greater level of uniformity. Flat rate fields received 45 units of
