Georgia O’Brien, Extension Coordinator at LandWISE joins us to talk about the LandWISE Nutrient Budget Templates – two straightforward templates that support vegetable growers to compare their fertiliser plans with published guidelines and assess the nutrient balance post-harvest.
As well as being an important tool for recording input efficiency – nutrient budgeting is becoming more prevalent in regional plans by councils. Some vegetable growers in sensitive catchments require a nutrient budget in order to obtain a consent to farm.
There are number of ways to measure soil fertility and there are some great resources available to use this information to develop fertiliser plans. FAR’s Nitrate Quick Test Mass Balance Tool helps growers to estimate crop nitrogen uptake from a standard curve, and uses Nitrate Quick Test results to determine crop demand for the remainder of the crop’s growth. In 2019, Horticulture NZ and the Fertiliser Association published “Nutrient Management for Vegetable Crops in New Zealand” by Jeff Reid and Jeff Morton. This book provides fertiliser recommendations developed from published trials for different vegetable crops based on soil test levels and expected crop yield.
Both the nitrogen and phosphorus templates rely on “Nutrient Management for Vegetable Crops in New Zealand” to determine the nutrient balance. The two templates (one for Nitrogen and one for Phosphorus) are in pdf format and can be downloaded here from the LandWISE website.