Nitrogen management- one of life’s biggest mysteries, right? Two things that aren’t a mystery: nitrogen is necessary for maximum corn yield, and nitrogen is not a cheap investment.
“You know, we’re facing a year here with tough commodity prices, expenses are still high, nitrogen being one of those,” says Andrew Luzum, nitrogen stabilizer specialist for Corteva. “You’re going to be thinking about spending upwards of $100 an acre this year for a nitrogen investment on a corn acre. We want to make sure we get all that nitrogen in our corn plant as much as we can.”
Luzum says it’s about making sure that the nitrogen is there when the corn plant needs it, and that’s where stabilizers can help.
“We sell two products- N-Serve® and Instinct. I think the largest thing we try to do is keep that nitrogen in the ammonium form as long as we can. When it’s in the ammonium form, it’s stable in the soil, right? It’s positive charged, soils are negatively charged. It’s the reason why we don’t ever talk about ammonium in the water, but we talk about nitrates in the water. Corn can utilize both, so we want to make sure we’re keeping it in a form that we can keep it around.”
Luzum says proven stabilizers like the ones from Corteva help keep nitrogen where it needs to be longer, especially between V8 and tassel when the plant really needs it to be high yielding corn.
“Nitrification is a biological process. Soil temperatures drive that. The warmer the soil temperatures, the faster that process happens, and so that’s when you use a proven stabilizer like N-Serve and Instinct, we keep it in the root zone longer. We have 16% less leaching. By doing that, we hold on to that nitrogen for that additional time period. So, even when we’re talking side dress applications or late spring applications, it works.”
Learn more about Instinct and N-Serve at Corteva.us.
