Renewable Farming

12 ways to make a good crop great by foliar feeding

Ten years ago, Renewable Farming demonstrated to a neighbor how foliar feeding corn with slow-release nitrogen, mobilized with WakeUP, could add yield to an already excellent crop. That was our first “demo” of foliar feeding.

Since then we’ve done thousands of foliar nutrition trials with a wide array of NPK, traces, biologicals and biostimulants. That accumulated data offered our clients a convincing body of evidence showing how to make foliar feeding more effective with WakeUP. (Click on this link to download and view a PDF version of a PowerPoint presentation on foliar feeding.)

June 4, 2018   By Jerry Carlson — In 2008, not many farmers used foliar feeding. But we had an innovative neighbor who agreed to field-test foliar application of nitrogen alone in water, and with WakeUP, on a beautiful cornfield in Grundy County, Iowa.

Four of the 2,300-ft.-long strips were given a gallon per acre of slow-release Kugler KQ-XRN 28% nitrogen in 10 gallons of water.

To this same solution in the tank, we added WakeUP to deliver 5 ounces per acre, and the grower sprayed another four strips.  On Oct. 12, 2008, I rode the combine with him to verify yields. He used a carefully calibrated yield monitor, confirmed with a weigh wagon. I rode in the cab with the grower, and wrote down the total weight on a data log as each strip was harvested. I measured the corn’s test weight and moisture from each strip with my electronic Dickey-John meter, verifying each reading with the grower. That provided a moisture and weight-corrected yield.

The chart below shows yield response.

1. Four strips of unsprayed corn averaged 178.32 bu. per acre.

2. Four strips sprayed with the gallon of 28% nitrogen alone climbed by 6.8 bu. per acre.

3. The four strips sprayed with nitrogen which had been tank-mixed with WakeUP averaged almost 12 bu. per acre over the unsprayed strips. 

 

Even though local cash corn prices hovered around $3 per bushel that marketing season, a yield gain that generated another gross income of $36 per acre for a product cost of about $12 per acre began to make it worthwhile in that grower’s eyes. (Also, decade ago, WakeUP sold for about $150 per gallon ($5.85 per acre then) — far more than our $90 per gallon today ($3.50 per acre now). So, your cost for foliar WakeUP today is about $2 per acre less than ten years ago.

On top of that, we’ve built a new and much-improved formulation of WakeUP specifically for foliar applications. We we trademark it as “WakeUP Summer.”

And today, many of our regular customers tell us, “Anytime I go to the field with a sprayer, there’s WakeUP Summer in the tank.”