Record high fertilizer prices this winter have driven a lot of creative thinking about cost-cutting strategies for 2022. Dairy farmers are at an advantage as manure is a tremendous source of all essential nutrients, and typical rotations of corn and alfalfa/grass result in nutrient and other benefits for corn following sod.

Manure is a valuable source of nutrients and soil-building organic matter. It is always important to manage manure nutrients to maximize availability for crops and minimize environmental losses, but that is especially true this spring as fertilizer prices have skyrocketed.

While knowing yield per field is useful for inventory management and to identify where field-based management changes can be made, knowing where high and low or variable yielding areas are within fields facilitates zone-specific management, which is likely to benefit yield, reduce the environmental impact of overapplication, and increase return on investment of inputs like seed and fertilizer over time.

Double-cropping with both warm- and cool-season forages in New York can have many benefits, including providing a source of forage yield in the spring that potentially leads to greater total season yields than a monocrop system, increasing rotation diversity, and providing year-round soil cover.

Plants need nitrogen to grow and produce high-quality crops. How much will be required is difficult to predict with absolute certainty. What we do know is that the soil in crop fields can be a very important source of nitrogen for crop growth.

There are numerous approaches to manage nitrogen to fertilize crops. Many of the pros and cons were described and summarized in the 2018 Agronomy Journal publication “Strengths and Limitations of Nitrogen Rate Recommendations for Corn and Opportunities for Improvement.”

With yield monitor technology, silage growers can see the impact of management changes in every field section over time. Unfortunately, even with calibrated equipment and best operator practices, yield maps can look pretty confusing without some post-harvest processing.

Forage sorghum is a drought- and heat-tolerant warm-season grass that can be used for silage on dairy farms. Since it requires a soil temperature of at least 60°F for planting, the recommended planting time for New York is early June, unlike corn, which is usually planted earlier in the spring.

Corn silage and grain yields have steadily increased since World War II (Figure 1) with a slightly greater increase per year for corn grain than for corn silage, possibly reflecting an emphasis on corn grain improvement by plant breeders in the past decades.