Farmers routinely monitor soil nutrients to guide nutrient management, but puzzlingly, post-mortems of crop nutrition are rare. This presentation reviews detection of crop nutrient shortages during growth, and how well foliar sprays can correct them. It then reviews the value to farms of routinely monitoring crop nutrients at harvest, at field or farm scales, and as concentrations (e.g. %DM) or as quantities (e.g. kg/ha). Critical nutrient concentrations in grains are reviewed, and grain nutrient data from thousands of farm crops are presented to indicate frequencies of nutrient deficiencies and the predictive value of soil analyses. The presentation concludes by suggesting that management of crop nutrition should be guided more by routine crop nutrition post-mortems than by routine soil analyses.
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Soil phosphorus and potassium monitoring at the national level by means of a soil test database.
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