Good evening. Welcome to our press epistemology. My name is Travis Shaddicks. I hope everybody's doing well. Thursday evening, August eight. There's only three or four more Thursday night shows left. I'm going to switch it the Thursday night to Tuesday night in September. So please remember, not going away. I'm just moving at the Tuesday night instead of Thursday night or the NFL football season. So I'll be doing Monday morning for the members only at 10. Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. for the public. And then there's I'm sorry, then Tuesday night in starting in September. Sorry, I just ran over here. I'm trying to catch my breath. That's running around running a little late. Um, I format. Okay, um, YouTube, they changed a little line in their code and messed up my software system. So I'm going to do my best to make it work. And which which includes some little minor fixes as I'm talking right now. So until otherwise, there's going to be a little bit of change in some of the way it looks on YouTube. And please for anybody who's kind enough, I had a complete wipe out of my whole system because YouTube changed something and I tried to fidget with it. Anyway, if the audio sounds off, the video sounds off, just please drop me a little kind comment and let me know, Hey, it's oversaturated, it's too loud or too quiet or whatever it is because I had to re reset everything and to wipe my entire system and restart everything from scratch. So I did my best to get it back on and running. And I'm not going to swear I did get it all running by the way it was, but I'm trying to get back to where it was. So so unfortunately, I, you know, the people who are used to streaming or where what the problem is with YouTube, there's a little problem with the CSS code. So anyway, welcome. If you're tuning in for the first time, this is turfgrass epistemology, we explore the scientific literature and explore our knowledge of turfgrass science, try to find knowledge wherever it may lie, the truth, and hopefully either support our management practices or change our management practices accordingly with whatever the evidence, however the evidence guides us. So we tend to go into the literature fairly deep in this channel. It's a long form podcast sort of episode. This is not a sit on for five or 10 minutes and learn how to sharpen your lawnmower blades type of show. There's plenty of need for those types of shows, but this is not that show. So this is a hangout and listen and just, you know, listen while it's in the background when you're in the shop or on your golf cart or driving from a one lawn to the next lawn. So welcome, everybody. The membership continues to grow. I think we're right at 70 now. And I wanted to make sure it but it understands that the memberships support the channel and what it takes to keep it running online, which is not a whole lot, but anything left over supports turfgrass research. So all the money left over, which is not a whole lot right now, but it's growing after it's left over and paying the internet and paying for the lights and paying for the cameras and all these microphones and whatever else, whenever that gets all paid off, then the left over money goes to support the research that I do with publication fees. Each publication is $1,500 to give you guys an idea what it costs to publish something nowadays. And so I really appreciate the members paying, whether you're entry level or their pro level, whatever it is, super appreciative of your commitment to turfgrass research. The finances of the channel, I go over in detail with the pro members on our every we have a meeting every two or three months on zoom and I showed them the money and I show them what's coming in and and I'm not afraid to show what it is. It's not a whole lot. Like I said, but any little bit helps goes a long way for towards supporting what I do in turfgrass research and publishing fees and so forth. So I sincerely appreciate that. Tuesday's show was that once again, apparently a hit, I don't know if I thought about maybe dropping it, but because I get a lot of hate mail, you know, I get a lot of trolls and hate mail that I hate, you know, I hate full comments and stuff like that. They misunderstand what it is that I'm doing. And I'm again, they're probably right. I'll just knock it off. But then there's so much interest in it that I guess I'm probably will keep it going. So I'll just keep doing what I'm doing. Well, Tuesday's morning public public access show is is open and I'm just showing a video and commenting on it. So if you want to hang out on Tuesday morning with me and watch a turfgrass video and just listen to whatever my thoughts are on the video, those are on those are on Tuesday mornings at 10am open to everybody. Okay. Okay, sorry, I'm out of breath. So we've been going over the soil testing literature on primarily based count on saturation. For those of you who may not be aware of your first time here, based kind of saturation is the idea that the certain proportion of the exchange sites in the soil need to be occupied by by the base cations calcium magnesium and potassium and so forth. The concept is is fraudulent. It's not evidence based. And many of the companies that continue to sell products based on that are are fraudsters, they're con artists, they're basically, if if they know, then they're disinforming you, they're liars. If they don't know, then they're just ignorant and they're misinforming you in either way, they're and they're selling you something based upon a concept that is known to be incorrect. And so that's what we're doing. We're going over the literature on that topic. We've been going over it for several, several weeks now. And tonight's paper is, in my opinion, the most important paper on soil testing. Since, I mean, well, on this topic of base concentration, probably probably ever really, at least in the 100, it's been published, there's been stuff published since the late 1800s, so about 120 or 30 years. And in my opinion, this is the most important base kind of saturation in soil test philosophy paper. It made it really is the most important soil test paper. Other than MALIX 84 paper, probably, you know, in my opinion, ever, maybe, I mean, MALIX 84 paper obviously is immensely important. That's the one that established MALIX three as a valid soil test extract. But I was published in 84. This one was published in 82. So right around that same time, there was a lot of good papers coming out from the scientific community. And this is one of them. So I'm going to do my best to adjust this tonight. It's not particularly very long. It's really not overly long. There's some language in it that, you know, is a little more firm than I would like. But the concept is incredibly important in the way in which they conducted this project is the same way that is being repeated as we sit here tonight on August 8, 2024. The concept is being repeated on turfgrass locations in at least two locations in September 18 on three locations. So we're repeating it on turf. We're basically taking this paper and duplicating the materials and methods only on turfgrass. The paper tonight is going to be on corn. But it's that important. So we're repeating it on turf. And for anybody that wants to hang out with me in Northwest Florida, I'll be in Northwest Florida on September 18 if you want to cross pass with me, give me a call, let you know where I'm going to be. Okay, let's see. And my whole system has changed here, guys and gals. So I'll have to bear with me. Bear with me a little bit. Okay, I got it. Okay. The title of today's paper is the economic and agronomic impacts of varied philosophies of soil testing by Olson, Frank, Grubowski and Ream. Now, this paper is so important and so well known among a scientist. I called up a colleague of mine, I don't know, six months ago, seven months ago, who also kind of does what I do. And I said, Hey, I wanted to see if you want to collaborate on some work. Are you familiar with the Olson 82 paper? And he said, Oh, I love the paper. I'm repeating it right now in turfgrass. I was like, Oh, man, you beat me to it. Like that's genius. You know, so he was already repeating the study and we hadn't even he had just started it. And we hadn't even talked about it. That's that's sort of how minds of scientists, I guess sometimes cross paths, he was already thinking and doing what I was thinking about doing. And so it's it was brilliant. We were incredibly, incredibly interesting to see that he was doing the same thing that I was thinking about doing. So anyway, that's the name of this paper tonight. And this was published in the agronomy journal, I think it was, agronomy journal in 1982. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with agronomy journal, this is that's the that's the publication journal for the agronomy side of America. But it's merged with the crop science and the soil science side of America's years ago, and they call them the tri societies, you can go to crops soils or agronomy.org either one of those three and join any any of those three associations and get access to I think all the journals, you used to have to pay individually for the journals, I think it was like $50 a year for each journal. And now I might be wrong, I don't want to be incorrect about this. But I think if you're a member of one, you have access to all the journals and then includes J.Q. and applied turfgrass and all these other journals too. So you can join that if you want to. And I know one or two of you have done that since listening to this channel. And you can read all all these papers I go over probably 90% of them are in one of those journals, the journals that I go other articles that I go over, 90 95% of them are in those journals. And if you're not interested in joining, you can go there and read the abstract for free and the abstract is going to be exactly this is going to be identical to this whole paragraph at the very beginning, and it's going to be online for you to read. And it'll give you at least a fundamental foundation of what the paper discusses and what they found just read but just by reading the abstract. Okay. Okay, here we go. So economic and economic and economic impacts of varied philosophies of soil testing. Soil fertility research and associated laboratory studies over the past 30 years have established the efficacy of soil testing as a means for predicting the nutrient needs of crops to be grown. And that is exactly what soil testing does. We have to provide a prediction of what the response is likely to be by applying this element. Okay, so we're going to be talking about agronomy tonight, agriculture tonight. And of course, this is a turfgrass channel. So in the world of turfgrass, if I'm going to recommend something off a soil test, the soil test is there to provide a reasonable prediction as to whether or not you would see a response from applying that nutrient, that's the whole purpose of a soil test, increase the economic, you know, viability of the crop in agriculture and in the world of turf, increase the turfgrass quality to a point where it would be acceptable. That's the way to look at it. Okay, but we have to provide a prediction. Oh, yeah, thanks Harper, I always appreciate you saying that Harper, he says sneak up on that like button, I always forget to do whatever it is I'm supposed to do for you to, you know, algorithms. And thanks for reminding me to tell people or ask people to press the like button. And God knows what that does for me, I don't know, but I'm supposed to say that. The procedure, soil testing procedure is generally recognized as the best available for diagnosing soil nutrient limitations before a crop is planted so that the correction can be made in that year, by a pro in that year, by appropriate fertilization. So in agriculture, they want the response to occur then, okay, that year, the farmer doesn't have any interest in seeing what's going to happen five years from now, he needs to buy, buy whatever he's going to buy, apply it and get a return on that investment that year on that on that yield. And turfgrass, that's that same thing exists. But an argument in a fairly good argument could be made that a single year is not entirely representative of what we're trying to accomplish in turfgrass. Because we're not harvesting unless you're in sod, because we're not harvesting the turf, we're looking at maintaining a quality turf. But we're not removing the turf as a crop unless you're in sod. So to measure nutrients over time or organic matter over time or firmness over time or something like that over time, to get an idea as to whether or not you have any pre existing conditions that need to be accounted for and measured over time. There's an argument to be made that that's probably that can be useful in turfgrass management. But in agriculture, their point is, it needs to be made in respond that year. Okay, and that's true. Although generally accepted as a viable practice, real philosophical differences exist on interpreting the tests. And I've said before, the process of taking a sample, sending the sample to the lab, the lab analyzing it and getting a number back, that much we got down. You if any of you that the senior members of the channel, people have been watching, I don't mean senior as an old, I mean, you know, the regular viewers, you probably know my position on this, I'm not a fan of taking soil tests just for the sake of taking soil tests, there's a lot of problems with soil tests, with huge interpretation issues, you wouldn't believe. But one problem that we don't have is understanding how we need to go out and take the sample. And the process of actually analyzing the sample that much, I'm all on board for not a problem. It's the interpretation as this as they say here, real philosophical differences exist on the interpretation of the results. That's the issue. That's the problem. And in turfgrass, it's even a, it's even a larger problem in turfgrass than it is in agriculture. As an agricultural, you'll see three papers a year come out on potassium calibrations on, you know, wheat and South Dakota soils or something, you'll see, you know, papers all time come out like that. And turfgrass, we don't have near the revenue or money to perform these projects. So there's not a lot of calibration work or correlation work being done at all in turfgrass compared to agriculture. But even in agriculture, they have philosophical differences on the results. That's the problem is that they have they have problems and they have the best data. Imagine our issues in turf. Three major concepts are in the use are in use by the various organizations doing soil testing maintenance. Okay, so I guess this is soil maintenance. I don't know what this is. This is some sort of typo or something. Anyways, maintenance, cation, saturation, and sufficiency level. These are the three philosophies they're going to be talking about today. The maintenance concept implies that whatever the soil test level, a quantity of nutrient should be applied to replace the amount expected to be removed by the crop. And in case of turfgrass to be removed by clippings or to be needed by the turf to accomplish a quality level. This conservation of a soils nutrient supply capacity has strong appeal, but discounts the economic aspect of the farmer in those situations where the soils delivering capacity of a given nutrient may be adequate for top yields for some years to come. Now, I had a meeting with a member. I'm not sure if he's here tonight. And he asked me a very good question. I think this was just just a day or two ago. He said, I'm trying to understand the difference between these philosophies about this buildup and maintain versus slant. I understand the value of slant. But I'm not, but when it comes to the buildup and maintain it seems like we would want to, and I don't want to misquote him my understanding is it seemed he said it would seem like we'd want to add a little bit to the soil to maintain it. This is called the buildup and maintain philosophy. Okay. He's saying what is the risk to that? He asked me on a calendly appointment. What is the risk to just building it up in the soil in terms of turfgrass deficiencies or issues that we might have? And my response to that was similar to the response that that's in this paragraph. And that is, agriculturally, there is very little risk. You're you're the chances of you being deficient and under a nutrient deficiency under that philosophy are far lower than the chances of being deficient under the slant method, because you're applying more nutrients than you would probably ever pull out of the soil. So in terms of the turfgrass to build up the nutrients in the soil, the risk of having a deficiency is almost zero. I mean, you probably never run into a deficiency under that scenario. You might run into a toxicity with some zinc levels or you might run into some problems with excess of potassium applications. But that's not the issue. The issue is the cost to do that is substantially greater than the cost to follow slant. And time after time after time, we see the response between slant and between build up and maintain to be the same. The risk is much, much greater following slant to ever encounter a deficiency. It's greater, but we really don't ever see these occur. And at least not in the literature. Okay. So I want to make sure that's clear is that the build up and maintain the problem with it is not the or I guess the benefit of it is is that you're greatly applying more nutrients than you would ever you never need. And so the chances of you ever being deficient is extremely low. It just costs a lot more in your hype. You're really inflating the nutrient pool and the soil to the point where you would never be deficient from more than likely. But you might also encounter some environmental concerns if you get too crazy with the phosphorus and things like that. Okay. But it's not a nutrient deficiency issue at all. The cat out. So that's that's the build up and maintain philosophy. The cat on ratio concept probably originated from the New Jersey work that projected an ideal soil as one of the following distributions of exchangeable cations. And this was the work done by bear and before him by low and so forth. And then after bear was by well, at the same time as bear, but also after bear was all break. And they were saying that the cutting exchange capacity should be occupied by 65% calcium, 10% magnesium, 5% potassium and so forth. These these percentages down here. And then they're with calcium to magnesium of 6.5 to one, which we've we've shown in more than one publication that this is ridiculous. There's no evidence to support that at all. Even my bears own data, which will go over, we're going to go over Dr. Bear's data. And you'll see multiple ratios of calcium magnesium and doesn't affect alfalfa alfalfa growth at all. You could be in turf grass. It was 100 to one calcium and these remember guys on the sartain paper went over I guess it was Monday morning. He was showing 100 calcium to one magnesium didn't affect remutigress at all. But in here, what they're saying is the base kind of saturation says that it should be 6.5 to one calcium magnesium calcium potassium should be 13 to one magnesium potassium of two to one. Okay, these are all just right out of thin air, zero evidence to support it. They're the their evidence that they produced showed that the ratios can be all over creation. Okay. And even the review papers, even, you know, we're quite assertive with their language saying they don't even know where these ratios came from. They clearly didn't come from the researchers own data. That's for sure. That's what that's what some of the review papers have been saying that we've been going over. It's like, quite funny, I think. Okay, many subsequent studies, however, have shown little relationship between crop yields in the above ratios of soil exchangeable cations instead, wide variations in those ratios have had no adverse effects on yields or crop quality. And he cites the McLean papers in the live heart paper here, which I will go over the 789, you don't see the names, but that's what these are. These are two McLean papers. And then I think this is live hearts paper. The literature indicates that field calibration of any of the cation ratios to yield response is tenuous at best. Very weak at best. The sufficiency level concept derives the studies. This is the slant method derives from studies that reveal no yield response to an applied nutrient above a certain soil test level. It has come from long term calibrations of soil tests with field yield response data, establishing ranges of, and then he goes through what's called the low, medium high, he'll say low, would be if the soil tests low, then the chances are very high that are say very low, then the chances are very high that you'd see a response. And if the soil tests very high, then they're likely it would be very low that you'd see response, he goes through that. The sufficiency level concept is employed by most universities, laboratories involving involved with testing, farmers soil samples, whereas a combination of the cation ratio and the maintenance concept are in use by the majority of commercial laboratories. As a result, most university laboratories have come to be regarded as being too conservative. So he's establishing in the in the introduction here, Olsen's establishing in the in the introduction. The problem, the observation, that's the scientific method. What's the observation? The observation is, is that farmers are seeing the university soil test laboratories as being too conservative, you're not recommending enough nutrients, because you're following this method. And these other laboratories are recommending a lot more nutrients. So they were getting sort of a bad name or bad rap, because they were making recommend they weren't recommending as many nutrients as the other laboratories were in the farmers perceive that as being inferior. Okay, there is added disagreement among soil test laboratories concerning the depth of soil. Okay, traditionally, the tillage layer of soil has received primary emphasis based on the predominance of roots in nutrient uptake from that zone. The significance of subsoil nutrient reserves, however, is increasingly being recognized in soil test calibration research. So what he's what he's saying is, generally, the soil test depth is the sick top six inches, the plow layer. But there is some interest, or there was an 82, about the low layers below that, providing some nutritional value, particularly in the world of nitrogen. And so they're going to look at that a little bit here. And in here, you're going to see some soil testing depth as it is at influences nutrients. Ultimately, soil testing must serve not only economic and agronomic requirements, but those of environmental scope as well. Examples exist around the country and the world of detrimental environmental effects, from excessive nutrient applications, including unacceptable levels of nutrients and surface and groundwater, and outright toxicities to some fruits and vegetables. So what they're saying is real simple, it's agriculturally important, it's economically important. But if that doesn't float your boat, if money doesn't drive you, and the growth of the crop doesn't drive you, then environmentally, there's a risk as well about overapplying nutrients. Okay, that's what they're saying. Accordingly, the basic objectives of the study were to determine how well the economic and environmental interests of agriculture were being served by soil testing in Nebraska and to acquire further assurance of the adequacy of university recommendations for satisfying those interests. Now, if there's one, there's there's two critiques I have in this paper. One is their objectives. Their objectives are quite vague. It's very sort of ambiguous. It can read it again. And you might still might not understand. I've read this thing. I don't know how many times I read this paper and I'm like, what were their objectives? It seems very vague. At the end of the day, what they're trying to do is they're trying to determine whether or not there's a difference economically, economically and environmentally between the nutrient recommendations that farmers receive from soil testing labs that follow the slant method or follow the base cut on saturation and maintenance method. That's what it comes down to. There's any differences between the nutrients that are recommended and the costs that were there to apply those to buy those nutrients. And then then after they replied, was there any difference in the nutrient content in the soil? And the harvest, obviously, the yield. So this is this is why this I'm going to read the materials and methods. But I want I just want to make sure we're on the same page here. I'm going to read this. And I want people to imagine the magnitude of people and resources necessary to do what they did. Okay, it is monumentally difficult to accomplish what they accomplished here on this study. But I'm going to read it. And I just want to make sure I emphasize that point. It's very, very difficult to do what they did. Four field locations were selected from conducting for conducting this study from 1973 to 1980, they have four locations. And they conducted it for eight years. Okay, they did this in Nebraska, they did this in the north in the eastern Nebraska, south central Nebraska, northern Nebraska, and then northeastern Nebraska. Corn was grown continuously on the plots, allowing fertility objectives of the various labs to be achieved over several years time with yield goals, specified until two. So here were the yield goals up here that they were trying to shoot for. And they have the different soils and so forth from what each they note the different soils. Okay. Yeah, Eric, no joke. That's a data set. I mean, four locations to do one study over eight years, things break. People retire, people pass on, grad students graduate, you know, lab technicians come and go, you know, the deans leave the chair. I mean, there's all sorts of stuff going on that just can throw these things out of whack funding can collapse. And that's in one location. They're doing this in four locations over eight years. Okay. And they chose I don't know why they chose these locations, because that's where that's where the research centers were. But they make a very clear point of showing what the CECs were, because the base kind of saturation con artists will argue that, well, you can't use this on soils less than eight, or maybe it's less than seven. Oh, no, no, maybe it's less than 10. They can't even make their own mind up what their what their lies are. So they make a point of saying that the CECs were well above any of the bogus minimums that the the charlatans will pull out of thin air. Okay, a representative soil sample was collected from the entire experimental experimental area of each location in the first year, there was mixed thoroughly, and then divided into five subsamples. One sample was mailed to the university soil testing laboratory lab E, and one to each of four commercial laboratories and they're labeled ABC and D. Okay. And they those labs providing moat that which they provided the most of the soil testing services to Nebraska farmers after the first year, each laboratory received a soil sample composite from all the replicated plots to which fertilizer had been applied according to the laboratory's recommendation in the prior year. So they took samples from each rep basically, mix it all together and they split it up into five different parts, and they they randomly mailed those to the laboratories for analysis. It's going to continue and show me show you how they did it, which is well, obviously, and also what I'm doing now. It's funny. The manner of handling get this this is this is what I like about this. The manner of handling and mailing the samples was such that no laboratory, including the universities, would know that this was not a farmer sample. In other words, they weren't told this is a research sample. They just sent it in like a random sample and it was not identified in any way that it could be perceived as a sample coming from research. Okay, all nutrients suggested by laboratory were assumed to be needed and were broadcast and incorporated prior to planting. Okay, so that's that's what I'm doing now. Okay, I'm sending samples to the different soil testing laboratories. And they're all blind and I'm actually doing it more than more than one way. So for example, I'm not going to go into it, but I'm going I'm sending it in a way that's, you know what, I'm not even going to say anything. Okay, but I'm doing it such that there's really it's virtually impossible to know where it's coming from. It's just in case anybody catches wind of it and they try to screw with it. So that when the data comes back, it's completely random and nobody has a clue except for myself, you know, what was coming and going in terms of the soil that soil analysis. It's critical and they did the same thing 40 years ago 1982. I high yielding corn hybrid adapted to the representative respective area was planted near the acceptable near near the accepted optimum planting date. And it goes on talks about, you know, how they planted it. That's all good fertilizer costs. Here we go. And I'm doing this. This was actually more this is actually more difficult than you might think. How do you get a quote unquote fertilizer cost? We're going to do it over eight years, right? Because the cost is going to change fertilizer costs in the data figures were derived from the statewide average retail costs for nutrients during the spring peak consumption period for the years involved. So in other words, they took the average at the most the most expensive time of the year and they took the average for that location for each year. Okay. You have to do that. You can't buy. And I've done cost studies. As you all probably know, I've done some cost studies on nitrogen. You can't buy a thing of fertilizer and then use it for seven straight years or five straight years and just say that was the cost. Because that was the cost seven years ago. What is it today? So you have to figure out some way and the way they do it is they just picked the time of year and they but they picked that cost to be the cost for that year. Okay. They may not have bought it every year. They may have had a stockpile of it, but they use that cost for each year's data set. Following harvest in 1980, the 1980 crop soil samples from zero to six inches six to 12. And then from Oh, soil samples from zero to five. And by Oh, so so top six inches the top 12 inches. And then then it goes in one foot increments all the way down to good Lord. How deep was that? What's 180 divided by 30 five feet divided by 30 six feet. Good Lord. They went six feet deep. Okay. So they did full samples and then did analysis and they this paragraph here talks about the analysis they did. They did phosphorus and potassium and all that stuff. Okay. Now that's that's the setting. We're going to the results now. Believe it or not, it's almost over. It's not really that long. So they're in Nebraska at four locations over eight years and they are growing corn. And what's going on is they're taking samples from the plots. And they're splitting that one sample up into five parts and they're randomly mailing it to different soil testing laboratories. One of the laboratories is the university laboratory that that provides recommendations based upon the sufficiency level approach. And then the other four laboratories that they mailed them to base their recommendations off of the base cut on saturation or build up and maintain approach. And then when they get the recommendations back, they follow that recommendation to a T. Whatever it is, they follow that lab's recommendations letter to the letter for that year's application. And then they account for the nutrients they applied. And they account for the cost of those nutrients that they applied for that treatment. So the treatment is soil test philosophy. Okay. I'm going to let's see where they first talk about figure one. I'm just going to talk about figure one. I don't even know where they talk about it. I'm just going to talk about it first and somewhere here on it. And I talked about this, uh, oh, an episode or two ago, I'm going to talk about this on these, these charts. They're not real easy to follow, but I'll do my best to explain them. What I'm looking at is a panel here. There's two panels. I'm going to go down here and there's going to show two more panels here at the bottom. But this is like panel in the top left that's shown on the screen now is, is one of the locations and the other panel is the other location. So there's four locations I'm showing for panels here. And what this is, this is showing the depth of the soil sample. So on the y axis, we're going to see soil sampling depth. On the x axis, we have many variables. We have organic matter percentage. Soil pH, phosphorus, and parts per million. They did Bray and then potassium and parts per million. So when you see this line right here that says K by it, this is the potassium and you have to follow this potassium scale. So the potassium started at about 300 parts per million in the top six inches. And then look how much it drops as you go down to a, to a foot. It drops rapidly down to a foot. And then when you get below a foot, it's down to about 150 parts per million potassium. And a couple episodes ago, I was talking about soil testing depth. That might have been a amount of members only stream. I can't remember. But soil testing depth has a massive influence on the nutrient analyses. And you can see it on potassium here. You can see it on phosphorus on this line right here. Phosphorus started at about 20 parts per million in the top six inches and dropped down to 10 parts per million in the top 12 inches. So if you come along and you took your sample at two or three inches or four inches, you might have 20 parts per million. If you took it at six inches, you might have 10 parts per million or 15 parts per million. And you'll go, well, I don't really care what is below the root zone and turfgrass. I just care about what's in the top two or three inches of where the root zone is. And I understand that idea. The problem is is that the calibrations, most of them have been conducted at six inch soil depths. So if the calibration was conducted on a six inch soil depth, and let's say, let's just say it was 20 parts per million phosphorus was the limit. And it was at six inches. Well, the top two or three inches wasn't going to be 20. It's probably going to be 30 or 40. And you're going to look at it at 20 and go, oh, we'll probably need to apply little phosphorus because you only sampled in the top three or four inches. But if you sampled in the top six inches, it would have been a different number. The point is, I'm only going to get too confused here. But the point is, if you're not sampling at the same depth the calibration was conducted, you can't really interpret the value that you're looking at on a soil test accurately. Because it might be greater than less than or the exact same as what the calibrations says it should be, or the correlation says it should be. So please find a way to get the soil sample depth, what the lab is asking to do and get it to be the same depth every single time. As close as you can reasonably do it. Okay, because you can see phosphorus is dropping off the floor here, dropping way down, potassium drops way down. The next one is, I can't even read this one, this kind of organic matter drops down and then pH. pH changes greatly too. Okay, so there is going to be changes based upon the soil testing depth. This is just one location. The other location you see different, it's a different set. But you can see the same thing. The phosphorus and organic matter start high and go low, potassium pH start high and go low, placed upon depth. And if we go down here, see the same thing. The depth, the top six inches is much greater than the top 12 inches. Okay, it's critical to understand. So let me see if I can answer this, there's a couple of questions in the chat. I don't know if I can answer them, but let me see what I can look, see what I can do here. So Chuck Benzing, oh, you're going to ask about, but yeah, I'm going to ask about corn and bushels. I'm going to be in trouble because I can't answer those. But it says, jumping head is bushels per acre of value that was judged and where genetics factored in. Oh, yeah, well, you're going to see the yield. Basically, you're asking about yield. Yes. So I believe it actually is. And it's going to be in kilograms per hectare, grain yield, average grain yield and kilograms per hectare. But yeah, that's bushels. That's the same. It's a different metric. But yes, they count for that. They will account for that. Chuck, I'll show that. And as far as the genetics, the corn, they showed the corn. And they showed the corn. They mentioned where was it? Corn was grown continuously on the plots, allowing fertility objectives. However, so. Here it is. So soils are one of the three most extensive. Oh, these are just soil series. Well, they, it was the same, it was the same genet. It was the same corn. It didn't, they didn't change the type of corn. It was the same. So genetics will have a problem. I mean, we'll have a difference, but they didn't change it. So it'd be, it'd be a constant across all treatments. Oh, yeah. And see, Mike Conroy asks really, really the most one of the most important questions. How do you know? How do you know what the soil testing depth is with the soil labs recommending? You'll, oftentimes in the submission form, they'll tell you, it'll say, collect a sample from turfgrass at four inches or whatever, six inches. However, what I'll tell you from just my experience could be wrong. I definitely could be wrong. I have almost no confidence that that particular soil testing lab has done any correlation or any calibration with turf grasses. I have almost zero confidence that ever happened at all. And if they did do it, I doubt they could actually tell you that it was done at six inches or at four inches or at three inches. So testing labs are a little bit separated from the science, that particular component of science. And I don't have much confidence in them knowing that indeed a calibration and correlation was conducted. And indeed it should be six inches. I kind of doubt that more than likely, they're piggybacking values off of an agricultural calibration done on alfalfa or corn or soybeans or something else. Believe it or not, that's probably or coastal Bermuda or some hay field or something. They're probably using those numbers because turfgrass doesn't have enough money to go out and do all this work on their own. So they're using the next best thing they can, which is alfalfa or something, which may or may not be relevant at all. May it may be completely irrelevant. And that's one again, one reason why I just don't have a lot of confidence in some of these values and some of these interpretations. And yeah, I'm not sure Jeremy if sits quietly at two parts a million at four inches. Oh, that's what you were at. I think, okay, maybe that's what I was remembering. I forget sometimes who has what on the values, but yeah, your turfgrass is not big ag. We are a grain of sand on the dirty boot of agriculture. We barely get noticed. Okay, so these charts up here are visually depict the importance of soil testing depth on organic matter pH, phosphorus and potassium. And at the end of the day, if you can't, to be frank, if you can't, if the soil testing last probably not going to know exactly what depth they took and did the calibration, they're not even going to know who did the calibration, be honest with you. So good luck with that. But the one thing you can do is you can at least make sure that your sample is the same every time. You can make sure that your sample is taken at the same time of year, every time and sent to the same lab every time. These things now, I think it probably makes sense to most people in the turfgrass world. But I don't know if the average turf, you know, connoisseur or turf fanatic really appreciates the potential error involved with taking a sample from six inches versus taking a sample of three inches, taking a sample and sending it to one lab versus another lab or taking a sample in January versus taking a sample in June. These have very, very magnified effects on the values that you will get off of the soil. So just do what you can to control it. And at least we have something, we have some confidence that we can, you know, numbers at least we can rely on your specific site. You know, again, I don't know if I'd have much confidence in going too far down those roads, but at least I have some knowing that you're doing your best to maintain what you can control. Average annual fertilizer applications as recommended by various laboratories along with the average yields and fertilizer costs for the year are presented in figures two, three, four and five. Yield goals were generally met throughout the course of the study. Okay. No significant differences in yield occurred from treatments advocated by the different laboratories for any location except south central, the south central location were results from lab C, which was one of the base kind of saturation labs. They were less than those from the other laboratories, but other than that one little blip on the radar, nothing changed the yield. So let's go look at it. We're going to go down here and look at this. What they're talking about is this right here. There's three, four and five, I think. So you're going to see a series of graphs that all look like this. And what you'll see on the Y axis, there's three Y axis. There's yield. Okay. And then there's the average fertilizer cost and then the average nutrient supplied. Okay. Those are three Y axes. On the X axis, you're going to see a control here, which is they didn't do anything. And then ABC and D, which are the laboratories. Now remember E is the university slant method. ABC and D are all the other laboratories that interpret these values according to base kind of saturation are built up and maintained. And this is what they're talking about. Average grain yield was identical. It didn't matter. We go down to the next one. Average grain yield was the exact same, except for the control where they didn't do any nutrient application. That's obvious. And then when they said there was a difference, this was where they saw a difference. The average grain yield was around 12 kilograms per hectare and then the one that was a little bit less was probably like 11.5 or something. This is what they're talking about. This was the only time where the average grain yield differed and it was from one of the base kind of saturation labs. But I would say biologically this is irrelevant. Okay. So that's what they're talking about in that paragraph. Let's go back up here. Okay. There were, however, why differences in the kinds and amounts of nutrients recommended with resulting large disparity in costs for the fertilizer treatments. Accordingly, from the economic standpoint alone, there is no question of the superiority of the more conservative fertilizer recommendations provided by Labby, the University Lab following SLAND now. I will say this in defense of anybody that's in disagreement with this article. You can't say that. Sorry. Sorry, Olson. Love the paper. Okay. There's a couple little bones I have to pick with the language. A scientist can't say there is no question of the superiority unless someone's solved the problem of hard solipsism, which as far as I know, no one solved that problem. So when you can't say there's no question, there's always, all we can say is we're confident to a certain probability. That language is way too strong. I don't think you'd ever get that into an article today. So there is always a question. Our confidence is extremely strong. Okay. That's good. That's fair enough to say. But there's always a question. There's always a little chance that we're wrong. Okay. So let's go look at some of the what he's talking about. The middle bars here are the nutrients that were applied. Remember this little bar right here is the SLAND method, the University Lab. This is the amount of nutrients that were applied according to the University Lab and look at all the nutrients that were applied according to the other four labs that follow base kind of saturation. And they have within these bars they have nitrogen and phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, zinc. They have all the various elements that were applied. But you can see we're not talking about another two or three percent here. Okay. The average nutrients that were applied from the University Lab was around 220 kilograms per hectare. That looks like that's probably what it was. And then the next lab up was around 250 to 60. That's not bad. But then the highest one is over 400, 420 or 30 kilograms per hectare. It's been almost double the amount of nutrients that were applied according to this lab up here. We're talking major differences in the amount of nutrients that were applied. And as I said before, I do care about that environmentally. I do care about the amount of nutrients that are being applied particularly in the world of phosphorus and nitrogen. But it would be... It would not be very strong argument if there was a corresponding increase in yield. They had accounted for that. In other words, you could say, "Yeah, we're applying more nutrients." But look at the yield. We're two or three X in the yield. But they're not two X, three X in the yield. The yield was identical. The yield was identical at around 10 kilograms per hectare. Oh, wait. Oh, this is times three. So it's 10... So it'd be at 10,000. Is that right? Or those... Hang on a second. I can't do those corn versions in my head. It's 10 times 10 to the... 10 times 10 to the third. So they're identical, but he's applying way more nutrients. Now, look at the cost. You see a very similar difference between the soil test labs on nutrients as you do the differences between costs. The cost of the fall in the slant method was around, let's just say, $80 an acre. Or $80 a hectare. Sorry, $80 a hectare. Following the other lab was $120 a hectare. Following the most expensive one was close to $180 a hectare. More than two times... I guess it'd be around two times the cost. So if you've ever heard me bash and beat up base kind of saturation and build up and maintain, this is why. I'm not saying you won't see a perfectly good lawn. I get this argument all the time. Oh, I follow his recommendations and my lawn's fine. I'm not saying you wouldn't have a good lawn. No one's making that argument. That's a straw, man. Well, I know what you're saying, but I follow Joe Bob's recommendations and my lawn looks great. My lawn looked horrible before and looks fantastic. Now, I'm sure it does. Just like this yield here, the yield was identical. As long as you're applying a similar or greater nutrients, you're probably going to have a perfectly good looking lawn, perfectly good looking fairway. That's not the argument. The argument is these bars, you're paying a lot of money. Or the exact same response. That's the argument. You're putting a lot more nutrients out there than you ever would need to following those recommendations. That's the argument. Not this. I have very good confidence that you would have a very good looking lawn by following, you know, all the hocus pocus recommendations on YouTube. Because you're putting out all these new, you're putting out far more than you never need, so you're going to see a good response. My argument is you don't need to spend all that money and buy all those nutrients and all that stuff. You're going to get the same looking lawn by applying, you know, critical thinking skills and working your way through it and probably just have a foundation of nitrogen. If you have a phosphorus efficiency, diagnose that and apply that, you have a potassium deficiency, diagnose that and apply that and so forth. Okay, you go down to the next location, you see a very similar different scale, but very similar response. Grain yield was identical. This is in the northern plat location. You see the differences in nutrient recommendations. The slant method was the least. The slant cost was the least. And you see the same exact response. Go down to the south central location. Same thing. The base concentration had a little less yield in this one year, but I, or this one thing was one lab C, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't hang my hat on that. That's biologically irrelevant in my opinion. But you do see a great deal more nutrients recommended by every lab except the slant lab, the university slant lab, and the cost was much, much greater than the in that lab. And you see the same thing here in the last location. Grain yield was identical. Just call this turf quality turf quality was identical. Nutrients were far more following the base kind of saturation and the cost was far more base kind of saturation, four locations, eight years. This is not a fluke. This is not a blip on a radar that we can't explain. This is a serious, serious study. Hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars of labor and time, and perhaps millions, eight years. I mean, imagine what the cost, how many professors were working on this, how many grad students were being paid and probably got their dissertations and theses published off this work. It's a lot of work. Lots and lots of money. Okay. And they found that following base concentration did not result in any increased yield, but did result in a ton more cost. Now I'm going to, I'm going to go through quickly the rest of this, because that's the meat and potatoes of the paper. The modest reduction in soil pH has accompanied the nitrogen applied to all lab plots with only small differences attributed to the varied fertilizer programs to date. Lab-E plots average, and I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but it is evident from the data, however, that long continued applications of larger amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur advocated by some of the commercial labs would accentuate the problem of soil acidity, even in the three irrigated sites. What he's talking about is these charts here. This green is the as the slant method. This, this red here, you can't read probably about 6.8 in the slant method with 6.4 on pH and the experimental area where they just didn't. This was, they didn't do anything to it, was seven. And what they're saying is, is that following any of the other laboratories, we're looking at pH of 6.2, 6.2, 6.3, and so forth. And what I think it's about argument, they're saying that if you continue to follow base kind of saturation and over apply these acidifying products like nitrogen and sulfur, you might continue to see that pH decline. And then you might, but I'm just saying over eight years, you see very little, you see a decline, okay, but you see very little differences between any of the plots that were that received nitrogen. And any of the other plots that received nitrogen, as long as they received some nitrogen, some sulfur, you see a reduction in pH, but it's still 6.2, 6.3, it's fine. Okay, I'm not going to go into that in a lot of detail, but you can see all the differences between phosphorus and potassium between the laboratories. This was the soil test values. This was at the initiation for the experimental area at initiation of the study. So this was soil test values 15 centimeters after the 1980 crop season, along with the values at the initiation. There you go. Okay. So you do see differences, obviously, but not, not huge differences between the base kind of saturation and the, and the slant method, not, not, not a whole lot in the soil. Okay, there's some, you'll see some things here and there that yes, there's, they're greater under base kind of saturation, but it's not drastically crazy. Okay. Like for, you know, you'll see zinc levels elevated at one location, if you follow base kind of saturation and build up and maintain, but you can look at that later if you want to pause the video and look at that later. Note in figure six that surface, that surface soil phosphorous zinc, I'm sorry, phosphorous, zinc and sulfur levels have been more than doubled by some of the laboratory treatments reaching concentrations for an excess of the university's recognized sufficiency levels expressed on the figure. Where was that at? Six, six, bigger six. Oh, this was down here. This was a different figure. This is a different situation. Yeah. Okay. So I wanted, I did want to show this. Let me show this and then I'll just jump to the conclusion as good as already 10 o'clock. These figures are, these are creative. I like these figures. In fact, I'll probably replicate them when I get to publish in my work, but they have the four figures like this from each location. And what they did was they drew a line across this. So this will be surface, phosphorous, zinc, sulfur, and then they have nitrate nitrogen up here. And they drew a line across this and said, this is the sufficiency level. And the council I had, the consultation I had with the member, I don't want to say the person, I don't want to say it and get the wrong name. I think he's here tonight though. He asked, well, I don't really, I don't want to, how far back off the line do I need to be? How far back off the cliff is safe. Now, I told him, well, the slant method generally has a little bit of a buffer built in. It's not going to put the line right at the cliff. Okay. So if you're following the slant method, you're probably fine. You're going to be well back off of that as long as you're following it. And one reason why I said that is because of this paper, this is the sufficiency level, this bar right here, or this line. And here's the laboratories, the ABC and E and I'm looking and then the Y axis has the zinc and the phosphorus and so forth. Okay. Yeah, Jeremy, I didn't want to, I didn't want to say anything if you weren't comfortable. Yeah, that was, it was Jeremy. I did. And I never know who might want to be known and not known. So yes, I met with Jeremy over the over the last day or two on a, on a consultation. And this, so this bar chart Jeremy is why I mentioned to you what I, what I mentioned to you on that meeting we had. This is the critical level. And you can see when they followed slant, they're well above the critical level, in this case for phosphorus. And when you're applying all these other philosophies, you're applying far more, far greater than the critical level. And then when you go to zinc, you're following your, your well above the critical level for zinc. Now in corn, zinc is important. Zinc has been documented to be deficient in corn, particularly in Colorado soils. So this might not be known in turf, but in corn, it's very well known. But you can, they actually make a point that these values here are elevated on the base kind of saturation method to a point where it's kind of concerning. It might actually be concerning that these zinc levels might be problematic. But it's far above the critical level. And the same thing with sulfur level was here. And the, the slant method was well above it as in, but you see these other bars continue to increase that, that point to increase the amount of sulfur well above. Even the slant method. And it's many, many times greater than the critical level. Okay. And notice here, it says the CEC was 22.9. And then on the next one, the CEC is 14. So all the base kind of saturation fraudsters can't use these say no, that's not any good because the CEC is too low. The CEC is fine for their bogus claims that you need a CEC greater than 10. And here's the next, the Northern Platt station, critical levels are noted here on these bar charts as well. And you can see that the slant method provided values, you know, probably well above, well, far above. And in terms of a safe zone, it's in the safe level above the critical level that you wouldn't really be worried about falling deficient. Following the other methods. You see the method, the values go way up. And that's the same thing I told you, Jeremy, on the meeting is that there's nothing wrong in terms of concern of being deficient following the buildup and maintaining or the base kind of saturation. You're not going to be deficient. And one reason why I said that is because of these charts. You're not going to be deficient. You're applying far more than you need. The issue is the cost to do that. And the resulting response, the resulting response is going to be basically the same and the cost is going to be greater. And you're going to do, you're going to apply far more nutrients than you need to. And this is why I told you that during that, whenever it was yesterday and day before yesterday. Same thing here, the zinc levels are elevated to a point where the authors say this is concerning with slant. It's fine. And then copper again, they say, I don't know the copper level that would be concerning. But again, they mentioned it in the text that this is a little concerning under base kind of saturation that the copper level would be so high. Okay, same thing with the next thing, the next location in South Central, CEC is 22, same exact story. I mean, I don't like to just sound like a broken record, same exact story. The slant method provided nutrients well above the critical level. And everything from copper to boron to zinc to phosphorus and the other methods or several of the other methods provided nutrients well in excess of the critical level. In other words, you're applying so many nutrients. You're so far above the critical level for phosphorus. You probably don't need to apply phosphorus for years, but yet they keep buying it and keep putting it out. Same thing here, Northeast Station critical level bar, same story over and over and over. Okay. Same thing. You've got more than enough following the slant method and following these other methods are you're applying, you're wasting nutrients and wasting money is essentially what the result is. I'm gonna get down to the conclusions. If I can get here, let me see if I can hang on, hang on, hang on, let me get back to this. Yeah, let's all start here and I'll read the rest of this. As for the usefulness of cation saturation ratios and predicting need for potassium and magnesium, it will be noted that potassium was recommended by all commercial laboratories, which is probably the case even with turfgrass, potassium is almost always recommended, and magnesium was recommended by labs A and B for the chartberg soil. The calcium to potassium ratio of the control soil at this site was 13 to 1. The calcium magnesium ratio was 3.1 to 1, and the magnesium potassium was 4.2 to 1, suggesting the possibility of potassium shortages or magnesium excess of the cation saturation concept. Okay, so what they're saying is the native soil had calcium and magnesium potassium in certain ratios that would have should have been concerning according to their concept. Not presented in figure three is the additional fact that soil changeable potassium has not changed perceptively over the eight year period despite varied potassium treatments. Labs A and B similarly advocated appreciable potassium magnesium treatments for the cosad in hasting soils, whether for maintenance or cation balancing purposes without influencing yield with soil calcium, the potassium ratio of eight to one calcium magnesium before to one, and these are potassium of two to one in the form of soil and then it goes on some other ratios. So there was no effect, but they kept recommending it. Soil K was not perceptively changed by the treatments throughout the period of the study at very high potassium levels of the soil. Okay? No magnesium was recommended for the Moody soil, but potassium was advocated by all but the slant method. Calcium potassium of 16 to one and calcium magnesium goes through all this other stuff in with no significant effects of yields or changes in soil test potassium after seven years. In other words, what they're saying is they had all these different ratios of calcium magnesium potassium all these different ratios and the labs are recommending applying all this stuff and the levels didn't really change that the magnitude of the extractable level didn't really change that much. And nor did the nor did the yield. Okay. So there's no point chasing your tail. And then we'll get to the red here. It is apparent that cation ratio was a little relevance in expressing need for the elements of potassium and magnesium. Although the presence of large quantities of both throughout the entire 180 centimeter profile of all soils may have been a conditioning factor. Earlier studies have indicated that yield response to potassium in this region is quite unlikely when soil exchangeable potassium levels are high throughout the rooting profile and I would say the same thing about turf. I don't know how many times I said this, the likelihood of you ever seeing a beneficial response to apply potassium when your soil may like three levels or say 50 or 60 or greater is essentially zero. Parts per million, 50, 60 parts per million, maybe like three potassium. You will, I don't want to say zero, it's, but pragmatically speaking, you have a zero percent chance of ever seeing a beneficial response to apply potassium. You will, however, have an increased chance of seeing a harmful effect applying potassium, especially when the soils already have enough potassium because of its influence on the on disease risk. Okay, not in a good way. You will increase the risk of turfgrass diseases in some cases on both warm season and cold season grasses by applying potassium on locations that are already well supplied with potassium. It's very possible that can happen. Not going to say it will, but the chances and the risk go up when you do. This high potassium has been true, even with quite sandy soils, having elite as an important component of the clay and potassium felled spores in the silt and clay fractions because of rapid K release from non exchangeable form of the clay lattice and from primary mental weather. No reason I highlighted that was because I just mentioned that the other day. Okay, where you can, you can have potassium levels at say, you know, 50, 60, 70 parts per million and you go, okay, well, I'm at that level. It's probably fine, but I'm removing the clippings. Let's say it's on a putting green or something. I'm removing the clipping. So I want to apply potassium to replace the potassium that I'm removing by removing the turfgrass clippings. But if the sand top dressings that you're applying contain potassium felt spars, then you're applying potassium bearing minerals that will slowly mineralize potassium into that root zone and you were not aware of it. So there's a lot going on that just doesn't show up on a soil test. Is there any indication that the sufficiency level concept is causing a depletion in available soil nutrients that will eventually be responsible by lowered productivity? The summary of surface soil test data from all locations and plots in table two indicates otherwise as comparison is made against values from lab E and control sample, there would seem to be no cause for concern so long as continuous surveillance maintenance test values above the sufficiency level. So again, to Jeremy who's in the chat tonight, that is directly pulled. I pulled my response directly from that paragraph. There's really not a concern about falling below a certain level is so long as your levels continue to be at or above the sufficiency level. I wouldn't be overly concerned about suddenly harvesting and I know you were removing your tissue, but you're removing the tissue. I don't know what's in your soil. You may have potassium felt spars. You may have other potassium bearing minerals in there that may be supplying potassium. I don't know. But as long as your turf's acceptable and you don't see some continued drop over time to the point where it would be below sufficiency levels, then I wouldn't be overly concerned about having a potassium deficiency. But if you see the trend going down and down and down because you're removing clipping down and down and down and down, it's not overly concerning. But as if you see the sufficiency levels here and you can predict the future getting down close to it, then then is a cause and a good reason to consider applying potassium or including it in your program at that point. This is a conclusion. These Nebraska results make it quite clear that cation balance in soil is not an essential consideration in estimating crop nutrient needs for the yields obtained in soil conditions of this study. Neither is the maintenance concept of fertilizer recommendations. Economically neither are they economically valid with soils already containing more than enough of the nutrients under consideration for optimum yields. A nutrient sufficiency approach to soil testing when adequately calibrated promises the surest method of achieving most economic yields while conserving non renewable sources and preserving environmental integrity. This paper serves as response to the often heard complaints. And this is one another little beef I have with this paper. No offense, but because they all, I mean, I love this paper, don't get me wrong. I mean, I print it and put it on my wall if my wife would let me. But you got to be real careful how you say certain things. You can tell these authors authors probably included a few things that were opinions rather than fact. This paper serves as a response to the often heard complaints that universities are two conservatives in their fertilizer recommendations. The fact that they are advocating the fact that they are advocating use of only those materials needed for most economic production, conservative. Conservative would seem the correct approach to cons... This is weird. Correct approach to conserving energy and limiting natural resources while preserving an acceptable environment. The growth in organic fertilizer use has contributed more than any other factor to the vast increase in agriculture productivity of the US since World War II. They don't know if there's ever been a more true statement set on this channel. I'll come back to that in a second. It was by no means the intent of this investigation to downgrade this all-important requisite, but rather one of the enhancing efficiencies in fertilizer used to the benefit of farmer and country. It's a little weird the way they word that, but I get this sometimes about, oh, it's inorganic, it's synthetic nitrogen and it's evil and we need to get off our addiction to synthetic nitrogen and we need to use all natural products or whatever. If you want to use natural products, knock yourself out. Go for it. I'll help you. I'll show you how to do it the best way possible for that source, if you need help. But don't have any delusions, okay? We're producing massive bushels per acre of corn, of cotton, of soybeans, well not soybeans, of alfalfa, alfalfa, any non-legume plant. We're creating huge, huge harvests off of this land because of synthetic nitrogen. The synthetic nitrogen process, the Haber-Bosch process, is estimated to account for the dietary needs of one half of the population of the planet. In other words, the 8 billion people that are on the planet or 7 billion people that are on the planet, half of their dietary needs are being met by synthetic nitrogen sources. Yes, we need to do it responsibly. Yes, we need to be careful how we do it and we need to pay attention to the unintended consequences of that. But the argument to, we should only use natural organic. Go do it. You can get 40 acres and go do whatever you want to do and you're fine living your life and your family on those 40 acres is not a problem. But for the agricultural needs and the dietary needs of the population that we're supplying it for, we need synthetic nitrogen, at least as of now. Okay, so the short and skinny of it is on this study, eight years, four locations, four different soil, five different soil testing philosophies, yields were the exact same, where they use slant, where they use base kind of saturation or build up and maintain. The differences were dramatic when it comes to the amount of nutrients required, slant was the least expensive and the least amount of nutrients required as opposed to the other laboratories and the other recommendations following base kind of saturation, which in some times approached two times the amount of nutrients and two times the cost if you just followed, then if you just followed slant. Okay. Let me see if I can answer any of the questions before I sign off tonight. Hopefully I can do this without screwing things up. Like I said, the early guys who just jumped on, I had a problem with my whole system shut down the night earlier and I had to reboot it all and reformat everything. So not everything's working. Okay, so Jeremy's asking, "How do I find slant levels for my area?" Well, that's another good question. I don't know if we have that much knowledge to have slant levels just for Northern Georgia or Northern California or wherever. I don't know if we were that knowledgeable in this area, but what I would say is that the slant methods that do exist in the literature. Let's say the slant level for potassium is, let's say it's 40 parts from an aromatic three. It's probably going to be around that. Maybe it's 50, maybe it's 35 or 40 for other soils, but it's not going to be 100. It's not going to be five if you switch soils or switch turf grasses. It's very unlikely that it would double. It's probably going to be somewhere around that 40 to 50 number, parsley from an aromatic three. With phosphorous, it really is probably 10, but I don't tell people 10. I usually say somewhere 10 to 20, if you're above 20, you're fine. It's very unlikely you'd ever see a beneficial response applied in phosphorous if you're above 20, but really it's probably lower than that, to be frank. So 10 to 20, you're probably fine with phosphorous. With magnesium, it's probably around that same number, probably 20, 25, may like three, something around that number. For magnesium, again, it's going to fluctuate a little bit on soils and turf grasses and seasons and things like that. It'll fluctuate a little bit, but it'll be around that number, something. So for P, what I say, PK and magnesium, that's what I was stick with. You generally don't run into calcium deficiencies, although, of course, when I deal with all these people online, I'm getting more and more soil samples coming in that are calcium deficient. But calcium deficiency in the literature doesn't really show up until you get below around 300, something like that. What else would you be interested in? Calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium. Manganese, there's a little bit in the literature about manganese that you need to probably stay above 30, parts from million manganese, but I've grown many, many years of turf grass with manganese less than 10, and it was fine. So we don't really have a lot of confidence in the manganese number. But if you want a number, I'd say, there's some root diseases that tend to be, the risk tends to be lower whenever the manganese is greater than 30 parts per million. But I don't have a lot of confidence in those numbers. I only have confidence in, say, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur. So for as long as you're in the double digits, mainly three, you're probably fine, calcium, as long as you're above probably 300, you're probably fine, parts per million. What else? I can't remember. Those are some rough numbers on slant. Whatever, if they have site-specific slant numbers for your location, then I would go by that. But if they don't, then those numbers I gave you are in the ballpark. And don't forget, although I don't advocate for its use because its methodology has never been refereed, it's never been properly scientifically vetted. If you have nothing else to rely upon, then just use MLSN. MLSN is, you know, the numbers are probably in the ballpark. The method has not ever been validated. So until it's scientifically validated, I don't include it in the scientific model. But the numbers are not that far off, and they're probably easier to remember than the numbers I just spouted out. Esteban Campos. He says, "Ricky question, the only time that I did a soil test, I took the sample all the way at six inches, removed the first inch from with grass and sent the rest of the sample, but with the info from the last episodes." Oh, maybe there was a question, but maybe the text, maybe you got cut off Esteban, I don't see a remainder of the question, but when I do soil samples, I take them to six inches. If you want to take them to four inches, I don't have a problem with that, as long as the calibration was conducted at that same depth, and the correlation was conducted at that same depth. I mean, it's fine, but we can't just be going around all over creation. I'm going to do it at two inches, I'm going to do it at six inches, I'm going to do it at twelve inches, and the lab say, "No, you need to do it at this depth." That's what the interpreted values come from. Then just do that. If I was going to send something to the University of Florida and they say, "No, I know they don't." But if they said we have correlation numbers set up four inches for that turf grass, then I would change my depth to four inches. They don't have that, but I would follow the recommendation if they showed me they had it. [silence] Okay, and then, okay. I think that's it, guys. What I'll do is I'll leave you for this week, and I'll be back on Monday morning for the members only show on a 10 a.m. Then Tuesday will be open to the public at 10 a.m. Then again, next Thursday night at 9 p.m. I really appreciate everybody showing up. Thank you to the members, as always. Thank you to all the subscribers and the viewers of the show. I really appreciate it. We're growing. Thanks a lot. See you Monday. Bye. These days, work is in trouble. We've outsourced most of our manufacturing to other countries, sending away good jobs and our capability to make things. American Giant is pushing back against that tide. They make the high-quality clothing staples you need for a comfortable, stylish, and active summer wardrobe. Like vintage style teas, breathable polos, lightweight sweatshirts, and so much more, right here in the USA. So when you buy American Giant, you create jobs in towns and cities across the country, and jobs bring pride, purpose. They stitch people together. 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