EASY Experiences

Murray Wise, EASY N cropping, Bowenville

EASY N saves time and money

A desire to become more efficient with fertiliser applications was the motivation for Murray Wise and his family to switch to EASY N liquid nitrogen in 2009.

Murray farms with his wife, Janette, and son, Lance, at Bowenville in Queensland, growing summer and winter crops on 1,600 hectares. They also work another 900 ha with Murray’s brother, Geoff.

“We found that granular fertiliser application was taking a long time and costing a lot in wear and tear on the machinery,” Murray explained.

“We started looking and found that EASY N offered us huge benefits in time savings.”

The Wise family calculated the costs of urea application compared with EASY N in their 400 ha wheat crop this year.

The calculation took into account the cost of buying each fertiliser, given a set application rate of 46 kg/ha of nitrogen, as well as the cost of the time spent applying each fertiliser.

They calculated that, with their 36 metre wide boomspray, they could have EASY N applied in under six hours.

In contrast, applying urea with their 14 metre wide disc planter would take approximately 36 hours and require an extra worker to fill the fertiliser bins.

This huge time-saving reduced fuel and labour costs, so that EASY N was more cost-effective than urea for the 400 ha crop, even when adding in the capital outlay to set up a 36,000 litre on-farm storage tank and pump.

The Wise family decided to make the switch and applied 120 L/ha of EASY N pre-plant for their wheat, knocking the stubble down with a Kelly chain at the same time.

Although their first experience with EASY N was for wheat, Murray said they have mostly concentrated on sorghum in recent years.

He added that while they rarely topdress crops, EASY N gave them the opportunity to topdress if extra nitrogen was needed.

“We’ve got the technology to use EASY N in prescription farming applications, which might come in handy because we have a mix of soil types that dry out at different speeds,” he said.

The Wise family also assess soil test results to determine an appropriate fertiliser program for sorghum this year.

“We don’t always soil test, but we did get some tests done before the winter crop and found that we could literally cut our expected nitrogen application rate in half,” he said.

“Soil testing is definitely worth it to see what’s going on in the soil.”

 

top