Spring Fertility with ASK®
If the weather or other harvest challenges last fall were factors leading to less fertilizer application than what you had planned, don’t panic, you still have options!
If you have been involved in farming for any length of time, it’s likely you have been down this road before. We can do a lot of things on the farm to control many factors that lead to the yields we are looking for in the fall, but we can’t control Mother Nature. If you find yourself in this position, you just have to keep powering forward. You are still going to plant a crop and that crop is still going to need to be fed in order to have a successful 2019 harvest.
Helena has been involved with plant nutrition for many years and we are learning new things every day. One of the things that we learned early on is that how we fed the crop can be just as important as what we feed it. We have developed a system that we call Advanced Soil Knowledge, or ASK®, where we are looking not only at crop needs, but also how the nutrients can be made more efficient, and how we can use everything we know about the soil – including what you as the grower knows, to give the most agronomically sound recommendation possible.
ASK is Helena’s answer to a balanced nutrition solution for our Midwestern crops. It’s not just your typical N-P-K fertility recommendation. It takes all of the information mentioned above and pairs it up with a full soil analysis to produce a fully balanced nutrient recommendation. Plants need food, and that food doesn’t just mean N-P-K. They need various micronutrients as well, including those that our own Doc Yarlagadda calls the “Mighty Midgets”. He calls them that because they are needed in much smaller quantities than the macro nutrients, but they are necessary for plant growth all the same. These micros, along with the macros (N, P, K, S, Zn, Mn and B) are key figures in our ASK program. Not only do they need to be present, but they need to be balanced correctly in relation to each other.
We’ve been working on our ASK equations with input from our best agronomists since the early 2000’s and we continue to tweak them to fit the ever-changing genetics and traits that are developed. The long and short of it is, don’t be alarmed if you still have “fall” fertilization to get done – Helena’s got your back with our ASK fertility program. Just get in touch with your local Helena Rep and ask them to tell you about ASK.
Oh yeah, one last thing, our research over many years and hundreds of trials show a 12+ bu/ac boost to corn…what a great investment for your crops!