Pulling Soil Samples

Hey everybody, it's Ryan. Welcome back to How Farms Work. It is springtime and that means we are heading into the crop season. Now, to start this season off, I'm going to show you guys how we soil sample. So, uh soil sampling is very important because it sets your baseline so that you know what you're working with in regards to fertilizer. Uh so, you know how to approach fertilizing, how much fertilizer you need, uh where to put it, and how much. So, we are going to go through I'm going to show you all the things that you need here real quick. Uh very simple, very straightforward, and uh you can usually hammer out quite a few acres pretty quick. Uh last fall I went and did all of my own acres uh in between harvesting. And ideally, fall time for me at least is my preferred time to soil sample because that gives you an opportunity to review the soil samples so that you know uh ahead of time how you know how you want to approach the season. Uh in the spring like this, you know, you can still do it uh depending on how soon the ground firms up and thaws out really. Um you know, that can leave you kind of short with time as far as, you know, changing any plans that you've made. But uh last fall I went through and found that I am pretty much deficient on potassium across all of my acres. Um and that's allowing me to change up my fertilizer and my crop rotations to help build that uh potassium level back up in the soil um as well of as well as plan for any remediations in season um like foliar applications with the drone. Uh for example, last year I did a uh potassium drone foliar fertilizer application in the summer. Um same time as fungicide. And that field yielded 12 bushels higher than my baseline. So, definitely made a difference and uh you know, as long as you plan appropriately, things like this more information is always extremely beneficial. So, uh let's go through and start this off with just talking about the very few things that you need uh to plan ahead of time. What you're going to need is a soil test probe. So, I am aiming for roughly 6 in deep that I'm going to be probing. And that's about halfway up, maybe a little bit more on this probe. And what that's going to do uh is allow me to take a representative sample of the top 6 in and that's where, you know, the majority of the root ball is going to be. Um they're going to expand deeper, but that's going to give us a pretty representative sample. Um if you have a soil test probe, if you know what depth you're aiming for, you can go through and you can put a notch in. Um you can put tape on you can try putting tape on. Uh I think that I would hit that repeatedly and it would just come off, but I kind of just eyeball it and for me that's pretty much well enough. So, these are the bags. You want to make sure that you have plenty. Um 9 to 10 up to 12 cores will fit into this bag. So, that'll get us up to that fill line that you see in the middle. Now, you're also going to need a bucket, which I've got plenty here. Um I'm going to take nine samples with the probe. I'm going to dump them into a bucket. I'm going to mix them up, um which may or may not be totally necessary. I usually try to stir the bucket up a little bit um to get a representative sample and then uh I put them into the bag. And the other things that we're going to need is a pen or marker to write on the bags with. Seems like I forget this one every time I go out, but remembered it today. Uh we've got our iPad. Now, we have a program on here called Echelon Ag and that's sourced through Nutrien. Now, that is going to allow us to break the field up to up into zones. So, I recommend using an iPad with cellular so that you have your location within the app. This iPad is only Wi-Fi. So, it doesn't give me the geolocation of where I'm currently at within the zone. Um however, I've been using my phone and comparing as I'm driving around the field. Uh tedious, extremely, but still very effective without having to go buy a new iPad. Um this one was just kind of a budget iPad and I tried working the app on my phone. Um not totally sure that even works. So, you definitely need at least an iPad to uh do this with. But, that using the Echelon Ag program will allow you to break the field up into zones. We'll take 9 to 10 cores per zone. And then we'll have a grid sample of the entire field that we can choose to variable rate applicate on. Um but, I'm actually what I'm interested to see here is that on this farm in particular, we've been putting for uh manure out as uh kind of like a fertilizer booster and we've really seen the yields boost on this farm since I really up'd my cow numbers and had more manure to put out there. However, I've only been applying it to

the left side of the farm when I'm leaving the buildings here. Um and that came through on the yield monitor pretty significantly as well um to show that there is a yield boost where I'm spreading the fertil- or the manure as fertilizer on the farm. So, uh I'm interested to see how the samples will come back um when I break it up into grids just to see what levels we're at because um this just provides us more information so that I can hopefully target other areas on the farm uh with the manure spreader going forward that might need it and we can use this to apply it to the other farms as well where we're, you know, really boosting our cow cattle numbers up as well. So, we've got our iPad. And of course, not totally necessary, but absolutely required for me. Got a T. So, we got our Gator. Uh we're going to fire this up and head out to the field and take our first sample. Uh today is extremely windy. Uh so, bear with me as far as the microphone goes. I know that you're going to hear a lot of wind noise when we're out there, but um I'm going to show you guys all the steps of the process just to make it uh a little bit more clear. I brought up the Echelon program on the iPad now and you can see that I made point grids. Now, I'm only going to be taking samples on the crop ground. I'm not going to be doing any samples on the hay. I like to deviate from the plan just a little bit, you know, if there's a target area that I'm trying to identify any issues on. Um you know, I'll take samples from that particular area. On this farm, uh there's a couple things to note. The strip all the way on the left to the west, um that strip it has been a target for manure, mostly because it's close to the buildings, but it is also probably the lowest yielding strip on the farm. And that's because it's right along the tree line. It's competing for nutrients and water um with the trees, and that has just resulted in it being lower uh lower yielding than the rest of the farm. Now, I expect that five, four, three and point points eight and nine will probably be higher in fertility than number six. Um mostly because I've been trying to spread uh mostly to those eight and nine points um with the manure, and I've been not really spreading anything on number six just to try to get a baseline. Now, that's was noticeable on the yield monitor. So, I'm really interested to see where we're at um fertility-wise, and I want to watch these going forward in the future just to see how, you know, how our normal crop rotations affect the fertility over time. Um and the thing with manure is that it's not always necessarily readily available up front, and that's something that we struggled with right out of the starting gate when I really started to bump those cow numbers up Uh um is that we weren't seeing an immediate effect with the manure boosting fertility on this farm, but after a couple years once that organic matter really started to get integrated and broken down and dropping off the those nutrients, we noticed a huge difference in yield in the last couple years especially. So, I'm going to be taking 10 grids or 10 samples. These are 5-acre grids. If we're going to be doing variable rate fertilizer, I would recommend doing 2 and 1/2 acre grids to get a better resolution on the field, but since we're just really trying to get a baseline for this farm and compare it to where we are based several years ago, 5-acre grids are going to be just fine. So, we're going to go out head out to number one. I'm only going to be targeting the crop ground, so in a situation like number one, I might take a sample from just out beyond the buildings here just to get a representative sample because when we get these back, the program will weight each sample and deliver us a kind of a graph like overlay that shows, you know, okay, this grid here, this is how it changes and it kind of blends everything together just to give you an idea and a way to try to target those areas with if you do things like variable rate fertilizing. Might be also wise to mention that you should probably carry around an extra, you know, 5 gallons of gas just so you don't run out in the middle of nowhere like I did last fall. It's fine. We'll be fine. We're home. We're out on top of the hill now and before I get started I wanted to make a quick note. I did some test trials here last fall. I spread some winter rye just to try to see how it affects the yield in various areas. And they did, you know, roughly 1 acre squares across this farm. It is very light because we did not get rain within 2 weeks after I had seeded this down. Just the fact that it's coming up at all is kind of a miracle, but you know, it's actually grown quite a

bit in the last week from the warm weather. And you can actually see over on the hilltop there, I did another square. I did the one further back as well. And um another thing to note is you can see where dad spread manure on this side of the strip. So, that was pre-planned because I haven't been spreading fertilizer over here. I'm going through and I'm going to be taking pictures with the drone to see where we're spreading the fertilizer at or the manure. I call it fertilizer, but you know, it is what it is. Where we're spreading the actual manure at and I can overlay the drone pictures next fall with the yield data so I can see how the areas yielded differently based on whether or not it got manure. So, just a couple of those things to help try to narrow down how think how certain things are affecting our yields. So, the thing that's kind of a pain for me is that I'm not able to have location on the iPad. So, I got to reference by phone, but usually I can still cross-reference well enough to figure out exactly where we're at and determine you know, where the corner of the grid is. So, the first spot I'm aiming for is down in this corner. I'm going to do 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 and then maybe 3 over here or maybe I'll reduce the number of samples down in this corner here and take another sample up there to try to get a sample from up there just to weigh it into the average. I'll grab our soil probe. We uh it down into an area preferably I like to avoid any organic matter uh so that way we're getting more soil versus um or versus organic matter, but it depending on who you ask, you know, some people will say you should try to avoid um I like personally like to just kind of not even look and just probe down, but if I'm in an area that has a lot of build-up, I'll you know, look at it go, "Okay, you know, I I'm going to take a sample from somewhere else. " And that's usually how I end up with the result that I get. Now, we're going to follow this up with plant tissue tests in the summer, and that'll allow me to see how the plants are performing with regards to pulling out nutrients out of the soil uh despite having all of my soil samples read low potassium, uh my potassium level for the most part in the crops was very good last year. So, um this is just another data point to try to figure out exactly where we're where we stand trying to boost the yield up as much as we can. All right, so we go ahead, step down on the probe, go to roughly 6 in, and and yeah, I'll do that. So, there we've got our sample. I'm going to take that over to the bucket. Preferably find a bucket that doesn't already have the Okay. Let's set this down so that I can make sure this is empty. Okay. Take the probe, and I like to whip it over. Give it a few good whacks. Might lose a little bit, but usually that does a pretty good job of cleaning out the probe to prevent cross-contamination to make sure that you're getting roughly the same sample size from every probe. Just that easy. We need to do that nine times over, and we'll have our first grid. I'm going to go ahead and keep rolling. I've got my 10 samples now. I'm going to go ahead and give this a good shake. Break those clots up. Now, something to note here on this farm is compared to my fields of mine that I had uh sampled last fall, this farm has very like hardly any compaction on it whatsoever. Um and I'm noticing this through the soil probe, which is another nice thing about getting out there and actually probing is that how easy I can do that with just one hand. Like no problem whatsoever. Just sinks right down in. So, uh that tells me at least in the top 6 in of soil there is almost zero compaction. Now, this is your Dora Explorer moment. Go ahead and say this out loud, everybody. What is the opposite of compaction? That's right. Or that's wrong. Um it is erosion. So, the more compaction you have, the more apt that your soil is to stay where it's at. Uh and the opposite of that is erosion. So, the more it rains, uh your soil is more likely to move. Um since this is soybeans, you know, especially on the bean grounds, you will see more erosion. Uh we had pretty significant rains this spring, and you can actually see the result of that here in the topsoil. So, now some ways that you can abate this are with cover crops, which I was testing uh up on the upper strips. Um and I also did the entire lower strip

along the woods because that is the hardest eroding area on this farm, and I wanted to see if there was a difference in um how that how that helped the erosion. And I haven't gotten back there to check on that yet, but uh that might be something to talk about in future video. Just go a little side note, um one of the nice things about getting out there and actually sampling yourself. Uh you can see what the difference is field to field uh with the erosion. Now, this farm in particular uh has gotten chisel plowed more heavily than others because of the manure. Uh I've been trying to vertical till as much as we can in the spring following the manure. I've been trying to spread fairly lightly so that it just kind of breaks up that manure and uh especially on the years like this where it's beans uh to try to keep from having to do ex- you know, extensive tillage on the field every single year. Uh but, you know, depending on how the manure is spread up with our old spreader that wasn't easily doable because it didn't do a very good job at breaking up the manure chunks like this spreader does. So, uh just some things to think about on your own farm. You guys aren't going to believe this, but where is my marker? Oh, Hans is going to hang me for that one. It's like the fifth marker. Oh, okay, never mind. Found it. We've got our baggy here. We're going to go ahead and write our name, which is Kister Farms, ballot. Field ID, West Sample ID, this is sample number one. That's all we need to write down for the first baggy. Depending on how neat my handwriting is, uh for the first couple bags I'll go through and write Kister Farms on this again. Um but, the higher number of samples you write down, you really don't want to be writing everything. So, I usually just do the field ID and then the sample ID. Cuz I figure by the fifth one they pretty much know who the field ID belongs to. I recommend using a smaller bucket. Just easier to handle. So, here we've got our sample. It's up almost exactly It is exactly at that line. Take her, flip it over, close it up, and we're ready for sample number two. I would say there's slightly more compaction on this strip. Reason being probably because this is where most of the manure gets applied. We've got our 10 samples now. So, we'll get a sheet uh from the Ashlawn app that has all those data points on it. So, here's an example of what it'll look like once these samples are processed, and here are the different tests that we'll be getting back. And as you can see, we can use this as actionable intelligence to make decisions going forward, uh which means soil sampling is very necessary. But, uh it's always a good idea to follow up with plant tissue tests throughout the summer to make sure that there aren't any uh other issues. Just because soil sample levels are low doesn't necessarily mean that the plants will be struggling um at any given moment for a particular nutrient. It's just that this is probably, you know, the major limiting factors uh for the plant. Um and as I saw last year, just because something is low uh in the soil doesn't necessarily mean that the plants will be short at any given time. But, uh anyway, uh hopefully get you guys learned something from this and uh it's soil sampling is very necessary. So, with that thanks for watching this video guys. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram. With that, I'll see you next time.