As an agronomist or farmer, you’re probably familiar with the status quo for nitrogen management: Make a nitrogen management plan at the beginning of the year. Then stick to it. In some cases, this means getting all your nitrogen out into the field prior to planting. In other cases, it’s not all out prior to planting, but shortly thereafter — and certainly before the crop is ready to use all of it.
But this is agriculture — and you know the only constant in this line of work is uncertainty. Tying ourselves to a plan at the beginning of the year, with no readiness for flexibility, only creates more risk down the road:
What if you need to apply more nitrogen later in the season because a significant amount of it was lost to heavy rains early in the season? (This increases your input costs later in the season.)
What if you didn’t actually need to apply all that nitrogen, and the crop would have been just fine without it? (These wasted applications equal wasted money.)
What if weather events change your crop’s needs throughout the season? (If you get hailed out and are forced to replant but you’ve already applied all your nitrogen that year, your hands are tied — even though you have lower yield potential.)
Think about your favorite football team heading into halftime down three touchdowns. Do they stick with the same game plan they had in the first half? Or do they take a read on what’s happened so far, and adjust their playbook for the second half? And if they don’t adjust, would you say that’s a well-coached team?
When teams make adjustments based on what’s happened on the field to that point, they have a better chance of winning. And it’s a similar story for nitrogen management. You need at least an outline of a plan when the season kicks off, sure. But you also need flexibility when the weather or other factors inevitably turn.
How to mitigate risk through deferred decision-making
Of course, you don’t want to wait until the last minute to come up with a management plan. There’s an important balance to strike between proactivity and reactivity.
Start with your basic early-season applications, but hold off on applying all your nitrogen. Wait until you see how the crop progresses and weather shakes out, then make decisions from there.
For example, if you hold back some of your nitrogen supplies, then experience mid-season drought, high winds, flooding, disease or other yield-limiting conditions you’ll have an opportunity to save an application (and money) because additional nitrogen won’t help the crop.
But if you get a couple months into the season and your crop shows signs of additional nitrogen demand and high yield potential, you can move forward with an additional application — with the knowledge that you’re only applying it because the crop truly needed it.
There can also be important financial savings associated with deferred decision-making.
Let’s say your crop gets hit with an unexpected, extreme weather event mid-season — like a hailstorm — and you lose the whole crop.
If you applied all your nitrogen at the beginning of the year, all those applications are a wash. Now, you’re relying fully on a crop insurance payout to break even.
But if you had deferred some of your application decisions and held back some of your nitrogen supply, now you have the flexibility to potentially replant — AND cash in on that insurance payout.
This may sound like an extreme example — but it happened to one of our N-Time users in Nebraska. After this farmer lost his entire crop to hail on June 7, he replanted on June 18. He used N-Time to pinpoint the new crop’s nitrogen needs — and was still able to produce a 190 bushels/acre yield, even after the devastating storm, while drastically reducing nitrogen applications. That’s the power of flexible decision-making.
Why deferred decision-making is more important than ever
Uncertainty has always been an inherent piece of agriculture. But data shows that weather events are becoming more extreme: from flooding to droughts, hail, and high winds.
The more you can defer decision-making and stay flexible, the more you can keep pace with unexpected events — and the more you can protect your profitability, even amid shifting conditions.
But deferring decision-making isn’t just about putting off applications, then guessing about them later in the season. You need information and data to take the guesswork out of it.
Sentinel Fertigation’s N-Time software is the tool that puts data behind those guesses of whether to apply nitrogen in-season. This data is based on actual, real-time yield potential and crop nutrition needs. And N-Time not only provides that data: it turns data into actionable insights you can take directly to the field.
If you want to learn more about how N-Time helps empower deferred decision-making, more flexible management, and improved profitability, reach out to our team today.
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