"Best?"

[bgmb]

Furrow,

I am begging you don't fall for this BS.
You are totally kidding yourself if you think you can replace or fertilizer with some bs product.

Do yourself and your family a favor pick up the phone and phone a real and reputable soil scientist at a university I recommend someone like Don Flaten at U of M. He will tell you the truth.

As for you Ag Guy, you make me sick, you are praying on the naive, uneducated and ill informed. I am sure you have contributed to many bankruptcies by selling your products which offer little or no value to unsuspecting farmers. I would much rather support a company like agrium at least they are selling me a product that has real value.

[furrowtickler]

Who ever said I was going to replace my fert with best/cff? Thanks for the advice and I will call your contact, But we are going to try a few feilds over a two/three year period and then see what happens. We are adding to our current fertility program not"replacing". As I said before, only a fool would replace any fert with a biological type product unless you are organic. lighten up, this will be a trial ony for now, no trail has ever caused finacial harm to our farm and a few have proven very financialy viable short term and long.

[furrowtickler]

One thing to think about as well, in the fall of 2000 the last year we applied fall NH3, we went heavy for us at the time. We put close to 80/85 lbs N for canola and around 70 N for the cereals. 2001 and 2002 were the driest years here scince the 30's - That my freind almost broke us. It also forced us to re-think fert and crop nutrition as a whole to keep the farm viable. It made us think outside the box and so far it has proven beneficial. We are far from naive just slightly "weathered".

[bgmb]

I am going to add one last comment to this thread as I have already made my views known.

That's good to know furrow that you aren't in any way using these phantom products as an excuse to replace nutrients.

I am sorry to pick on you Ag guy But I am just extremely fed up with companies pushing products with no !!REAL!! data to back them up. By data i don't mean lets split a field and have some half assed non replicated trial. Oh and if the product doesn't win that's ok I just won't tell anyone about that trial.

I mean real replicated side by side data over multiple years done by an unbiased third party. And lets see some results that are statistically significant not we got an average of a %5 yield increase on 3 trials that means absolutely nothing.

I hope farmers aren't fooled by these tricks, when trying a new product one should ask to see real data like i described above. If that cannot be supplied then I would be very skeptical.

One last note on the RR canola guys pulling their varieties out of the real trials so they can manufacture their own data to sell their products. Sick of getting their asses handed to them by Invigors so they pull out.

This is one area where I think the gov should spend some more of their ag $$$ doing unbiased real research, like PAMI and the ag canada research stations.

[furrowtickler]

What "real" trials are you talking about? PCVT? Why on this thread - nothing to do with best.

[ado089]

Enough is enough. These systems, and there are many of them, use one or all of the following principles. Seed primers to give young plants a shot of esential nutrients to get going, if you beleive in this make sure they contain a good dose of zinc. Zinc drives germination and growth hormone production. Second is the in crop stress releiver. This is generaly a balanced blend plus micros apllied with or near herbicide, hail or moisture stress. These prodcuts are desinged to give the plant a "snack" in order to tide them over until the entire sytem recovers from the stress shock. Be careful with these as they can "heat up" your chemical. Third is using organic acids to modify the soil chemistry/physics in furrow. By adding these material you are creating a pH buffer and modifying the cation carrying capacity of the imediate area. This causes more water to be held in the soil and encourages microbial growth and activity, I think some products may add suggar or starch to accelerate and amplify this effect. My advice is to get these product in furrow even if they suggest you can broadcast it. The fourth is a little more out there but it is a basicaly a spreading agent that you spray on the soil in orderd to break the surface tension of water to encourage more and deeper water infiltration. Are these products snake oil? Probably not. Are they right for everyone? I doubt it. These products in one form or another have been around for a long time but are not wide spread because they are difficult to understand and very situation specific in their applications, therefore they are not a fit for everyone. My advise is to identify if you have a problem and then seek out a product to solve it. Another note is that by using zero till for 10 years you will likely start to see alot of the same results as some of the soil modification products. No matter what the product claim don't cut much more than 10-15% of your normal/recomended fertility program and monitor the results with a benchmark soil test. This includes ortho phosphate, ESN, jumpstart, Avail, Agrotain, foliar top ups and any other product that claims to be more efficient. Also be cautious about products that cost less than about $3-4/ac and claim under 7-10% yield gain. This is phycological pivot point and the results are very difficult to measure or notice. Good products cost good money. Hope this helps.

[furrowtickler]

Well said ado.

[grgsrvc]

I don't think I could ever say it as well
Ado.

"do you have a problem? do you know what
the problem is? will you do something to
fix the problem?"

[makar]

on a off shoot subject someone mentioned magnetic seed treaters. A uncle never used them but always swore seeding to magnetic north direction made a huge difference. That was a few years ago, i cant remember what drill he had that could lay the seeds in a line pointing in a straight line germ wise.