Due to the ongoing drought, I’ve recently received questions along the lines of, “how much N is still available after the prill sits on the soil surface without rain for 35 plus days?” and, “should I begin a foliar fertilizer regiment to meet plant N/K/S/B demands?” In this blog, I tackle both of these questions and share N response curves generated from Tennessee data over the past 5 years.
“I applied urea and it didn’t rain for a month. Will my cotton crop have the N required to make close to maximum yields?”
For growers that have applied 60-90 lb as urea, the simple answer is yes; the amount of soil nitrate released from the urea you applied will likely meet cotton N demand without additional N fertilizers given plant available water increases significantly in the coming week. Generally, if surface applied urea fertilizer is not incorporated into the soil, some of the N may be lost as ammonia into the atmosphere depending on weather, soil properties and management practices. Continue reading
Climate-smart agriculture and hemp production are headlining the 2022 Milan No-Till Field Day, in addition to traditional no-till crop production topics. The Field Day is set for July 28 in Milan, Tenn. Featured presentations will include Understanding Climate Smart Agriculture, How Rainfall Is Changing and Affecting Water Management in Tennessee, Hemp Economics Outlook 2022, Does No-Till Mean Never-Till?, and more. 
A friend of mine shared a picture over the weekend of a dead snake on a fence and he’s recently started closing emails with the line ‘PRAY FOR RAIN’. As for me, all of my truck windows are down, the sprinkler is on in my yard, and I’ve got clothes hanging outside even though the dryer in the house works great.
As many of you know, Dr. Angela McClure, our Extension Corn and Soybean Specialist, retired at the end of June after 20 years of service. Dr. McClure will be greatly missed. We are actively searching for a replacement and hope to have the position filled quickly. In the meantime, my colleagues and I will do our best to cover these commodities until the position is filled.
Everyone seems to have an opinion on watering cotton in humid regions- do this, don’t do that unless this happens, etc. Even when you do everything right in a normal year, dryland cotton in TN often comes out close (and occasionally ahead) of irrigated. In a normal year, cotton often finds its way into the more droughty areas of the farm and is often bumped out from under pivots to make way for corn or soybeans which typically respond better to irrigation. 
More times than not, when a cotton planter left a TN field in 2022, a thunderstorm bringing ~2″ of rain and cool weather would arrive 3 days later. I’ve walked more replants this year than ever before and unfortunately the old saying ‘if you are on the fence, keep it’ rarely applied; in many fields, we weren’t anywhere near the metaphorical fence. Still, Tennessee’s ragged cotton crop has generally turned the corner and mid and late June have been cotton weather; our earliest cotton reached early bloom well prior-to the 4th. In this blog, I cover a few things to keep in mind as we begin to apply PGRs to more acres and look to push a few slower farms into ‘taking off’.