IMPACT: BIG RESULTS A TIMELY PRODUCT WITH

■ by Whitetail Institute Staff

Whitetail Institute’s Impact is a useful new tool that opens new opportunities to maximize food performance and save money. It lets you boost soil pH immediately and cut short-term fertilizer costs. It’s also an especially timely product, with fertilizer costs going through the roof.

It’s no secret that fertilizer costs have skyrocketed during the past year or two. Unfortunately, there seems to be little chance they’ll decrease this year. Should that push you to cut corners on fertilizing your food plots? Even as recently as a year or two ago, doing so might have made financial sense. Some folks had to decide whether to fully lime and fertilize or only partially do so and live with less-than-optimum food plot performance. Today, though, you have another option — one that lets you avoid or postpone part of the cost of fertilizer and still make sure your planting has the nutrients it needs. That product is Impact.

Impact is a sprayable soil additive that does two things. First, it provides a short-duration increase in soil pH of 68 percent compared to lime (calcium carbonate equivalent). One application is sufficient to grow most annual forages. A second application might benefit perennials. That, of course, depends on doing a laboratory soil test first to determine what your soil pH is. Second, Impact provides immediately available phosphorous and potassium.

Impact Soil Amendment

■ C reate high-yielding nutritious food plots in areas anywhere bulk or pellet lime is not an option.

■ Depending on soil type and rainfall amounts, Impact can improve forage quality and growth for three to five months with one application. It’s great for annual plantings. Perennial plots could need two or three applications.

Impact provides an immediate boost to soil pH. It can be used instead of lime to increase soil pH. The effect on soil pH won’t be as great as it would be with lime, but again, it’s immediate, and that’s one reason Impact is such a superb tool for last minute-food plots. It can also be used in addition to lime to overcome one shortcoming: Even if you work lime into the soil, which lets it work as quickly as possible, it still takes a while for soil pH to increase. By liming and then spraying with Impact, you can bring soil pH up quickly, and the dry lime application to the soil will help keep it up for a much longer term.

Don’t be fooled by calcium chloride. Some products being advertised as raising soil pH won’t work. You can tell those by looking for a product’s ingredient list to see if it’s calcium chloride. Calcium chloride does not raise soil pH — period. If you read the advertising of some calcium chloride products, you can spot the trick. It’s usually in one sentence in a long article that says the reason lime is added to the soil is to raise calcium. That is not true. The purpose for adding lime is to raise soil pH, not increase calcium. If your intention is to increase soil pH, use Impact, not calcium chloride.

Because Impact provides an immediate boost to soil nutrients, it gives you the option to cut the amount of fertilizer recommended in half. By spraying Impact and putting out half the fertilizer called for in your soil test report, you can give your food plot all the nutrition it needs and postpone purchasing larger amounts of standard fertilizer until prices are more reasonable.