Immobile Nutrient Study Published!

Discover if Deep-Banding Immobile Nutrients is right for your farm!

From 2018-2021, we completed a three year study with SARDA Ag Research and InnoTech Alberta, comparing the effectiveness of annual shallow-banding and once in three years deep-banding of P, K, Cu and PKCU.

Deep-banding of immobile nutrients (P, K, Cu) is considered one technique that may improve crop production under temperate dryland systems, where moister soil conditions prevail at seeding followed by relatively drier soil during the growing period.

For this project, we used three times the recommended rate for deep-banding treatments in 2018 and the recommended rate for the annual shallow-banding treatments in all three years. This project included a three-year crop rotation of peas-wheat-canola.

To identify performance, we evaluated the density, NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) and biomass of plants, yield of crops, and nutrient concentrations in seed and biomass between treatments and the control plot. This gave us an accurate understanding of how effective deep-banding immobile nutrients once every three years could be, and if farmers should look to adopt this practice to save input costs without undermining crop performance.

You can read the published paper here!