With World Weather reiterating a good rain for us this weekend, the Canola going in the ground right now has solid potential to outperform the Canola you seed 4-6 days later when you start up again.
Do a quick bit of math to see how much your post rain fertility would have to drop to offset bumping up the next 10-20 hours of seeding by 6-9 actual lbs of N (2-3 bushels worth) now and likely only 0.5-1bu less on the following acres next week. There is top-dress potential later if need be.
Example: – if you have 1000 acres of Canola left to seed and you wanted to bump up today’s 250 acres of seeding by 6 lbs (2bu worth, 1 bu=3.1 lbs), that would be 1500 actual lbs. When we come out of the rain in 5 days, you now drop the remaining 750 acres left to seed by those 1500 lbs, which is 2lbs actual per acre – less than 1 bu.
Essentially, we are trying to maximize Nitrogen use efficiency in a world where Nitrogen is now $900. If the yields perform as they potentially will, 250 acres running 3 bushels better will be worth $9500 with no added cost. We are simply playing some percentages.
The interesting play will be to steal Nitrogen now from our Durum acres (noting that we would then have to top-dress some S later), as the spread between New Crop Canola to Durum has gone from $1.50/bu (where each crop would roughly make the same ROI) to nearly $6.00/bu (where Canola has a significant profit advantage). This works perfectly in the Pulse – Oil – Cereal – Pulse, 3 Year Rotation where we are able to really load up on fertility in front of Canola because we have a Cereal coming the following year if the N wasn’t utilized. We do not want to be overloading our Cereal fertility in front of a Pulse the following year.
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