Nutrient Management Plan

3rd April 2018

Nutrient Management Plan

This week we are talking about making a Nutrient Management Plan (NMP) and the benefits it can have for your farm. For me a NMP is deciding on what output you want for your farm this year and then looking at what resources you have available to make this happen.

A good NMP should:

  1. Ensure that nutrient management meets all legal and industry requirements, that is the AHDB RB209 in the UK and the Teagasc Green Book in Ireland. It enables you to have record on nutrient applications to show you complied with the relevant legislation.
  2. Include a nutrient budget which compares nutrient inputs from all sources against the crops grown and expected yield from them.
  3. Minimise the cost of supplying nutrients and avoids wasted spending on unnecessary or unused nutrients.
  4. Minimise the risk of damage to the local environment

For growing crops as well as your NMP, you should consider:

  • Soil type
  • All inputs, lime, organic manures, residues, natural fixation (clover) and artificial fertilisers.
  • Location of land: are you in a Nutrient Vulnerable Zone (NVZ)? Or a Special Area of Conservation (SAC)? This can limit the amount of nutrient that you're allowed to put on.
  • Your plan for the farm, do you want to increase or keep production the same?

The foundation of a NMP is knowing the nutrient status of your soils, this will dictate how much nutrient is required to grow the crop. Low soil fertility will require more nutrients to grow, whereas high soil fertility might restrict you from putting on nutrients. In practice you will have fields of different nutrient status throughout your farm.

Thoughts on NMP's

To get the most of your NMP, generally you should try to:

  1. Know your soil nutrient status.
  2. Use nutrients on your farm first and balance with artificial fertiliser.
  3. Keep soil pH right, apply lime when your land can carry the lime spreader - it doesn't really matter what time of year lime is spread.
  4. Balance the nutrient off take from your soil with fertiliser inputs.
  5. Use your knowledge of your farm and how it behaves in different weather conditions as you progress through the year. No two years are ever going to be the same.

NMP's are very important, but they are just a plan made at the start of the year before we know what the weather will throw at us, I bet many plans had the second round of nitrogen going out in early April for 2018, and instead there might be none out at all! A plan is a roadmap, but you have to take account of the weather and your experience on how your farm grows crops. It allows you to benchmark off it to check progress from one year to the next. Please remember that these are general recommendations and that only you or your advisor knows what works best for your farm.

There is a saying "if it's not broke then don't fix it". There is a lot of material already made on NMP's, so here are links to Teagasc's and AHDB's great work in this area through the Greenbook and the RB209. They have lot of information on this topic and what you need to apply to grow your crops for your particular soil type.

As always please get in touch if you would like to discuss Nutrient Management Planning, get more information on our mineral and animal premixes or talk to us about increasing your efficiency on farm through our Soil Improvement Programme.

David Hagan
Agriculture Manager

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