URBANDALE, Iowa - Farmers recognize the Iowa Soybean Association’s watershed programming as particularly unique and effective. Like many watershed projects, one of the program’s goals is to demonstrate significant progress toward meeting state and federal water quality objectives.

But it’s equally important to the farmer group that a link is built between that goal and investigating ways of consistently improving agronomic and economic performance. The linkage is important to farmers, because it recognizes a simple truth: growers cannot afford to voluntarily adopt practices that limit agronomic and economic performance.

Dave Cunningham and his brother run a conventional row crop farming operation near Paton, Iowa. Cunningham participated in the Iowa Soybean Association’s Buttrick Creek watershed project in 2004. Buttrick Creek — a tributary of the Raccoon River — is a 27,000-acre watershed in west central Iowa. The Iowa Soybean Association has completed three years of nitrogen management evaluation on the majority of cornfields in the watershed, including replicated strip tests comparing fall nitrogen to spring or side-dress applications.

Cunningham said there were many reasons to get involved. “We signed up for the project because, like everyone else, we’ve seen all the discussion over the years about nutrient contamination in surface waters beyond Buttrick Creek. We also wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to find out what’s going on on our farm, and see if we can learn something.”

“We had a simple system that worked for us, so doing this work made it a little more complicated. We ran test strips, comparing a side-dress application of nitrogen to our customary fall-applied ammonia with N-serve.”

“I’d like to say definitively what we’ve learned from this, but I don’t want to jump the gun. When we did side-by-side testing of fall-applied ammonia versus side-dress, the fall-applied ammonia outperformed the side-dressed nitrogen application in terms of yield. We thought this was a year that fall-applied ammonia would be totally gone or at least enough gone so that there would be a very noticeable yield impact. That turned out not to be the case.”

“One reason for the difference may have been compaction that we noticed from side-dress application. We could follow that pattern even into fall, and have seen some 15 bushels to the acre less in the compaction-affected rows. So that’s certainly something for others to be aware of. It would also be nice to have a wider window of opportunity to side-dress.”

“If I were to give any advice to other growers, I’d say go ahead and do some research, but go slow. I guess, if we could turn back the clock, I’d have put 20 to 40 pounds of nitrogen on, and supplemented that with a side-dress application.”

“After our experience, I don’t want to say that we’ll make changes in our farming practices yet, because all we have is this one snapshot. Time will tell. You can’t draw conclusions from one year. We need to go back to the drawing board and keep looking for answers. In fact, economically, maybe the numbers just aren’t there to support the extra yield. That’s why we’ll keep looking at variations, to see how it shakes out. It’s only one look and we need to look at this repetitively for it to have meaning. But as it stands, I have enough stuff to scratch my head about for a while.”

At the end of the day, Iowa growers like Cunningham are learning to use the Iowa Soybean Association’s watershed programming to become better growers, better managers and better environmental stewards.

For more information on the Iowa Soybean Association’s agronomic and environmental programs, go to www.isafarmnet.com. If you have additional questions about this press release, please contact ISA’s Mike Tidman at 800-383-1423 or by email at mtidman@iasoybeans.com. To learn more about ISA, visit www.iasoybeans.com.

The Iowa Soybean Association develops policies and programs that help farmers expand profit opportunities while promoting environmentally sensitive production using the soybean checkoff and other resources. The Association is governed by an elected volunteer board of 21 farmers.