Agrii agronomist, Andrew Lowe, has been using Skippy Scout’s Green Area Index to recommend Nitrogen rates for Cereals, saving over £43/ha*
*Based on the average price of Nitrogen in 2022
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Using Skippy Scout £49.3/ha was saved on average
over the Winter Wheat operation
On one of his customers' farms, Andrew managed to save the grower between 58 kg/ha - 69 kg/ha across multiple fields of winter wheat.
For the harvest 2022 season farmer Will Green grew a Winter Wheat variety called Costello after a crop of oats. The average yield achieved for this on the farm is usually in the region of 8-8.5 t/ha.
“We would normally stick pretty much to RB209 recommendations for fertiliser applications, which last year said we would need to apply 220kg/ha of nitrogen to achieve our target yield,” he says.
However with the use of Skippy Scouts GAI values and Andrew’s SMN tests, it was shown that the crop only needed 151 kg/ha. This was then applied in three splits throughout March, April and May 2022. Two other fields produced similarly low recommendations of 152 kg/ha and 162 kg/ha of Nitrogen.
The sizeable savings across the 4 fields in today's market are a good enough outcome, moreover when it came to harvesting those three fields Will said: “The highest yield came in at 9.4t/ha, pretty much the best we ever get here, with an average of 8.25t/ha, which, considering the massive savings we saw in fertiliser costs, was a great result,”
Field Breakdown:
Field 1 (12 ha): 69 kg/ha saving = 828 kgs.
Field 2 (5.1 ha): 68 kg/ha saving = 346.8 kgs.
Field 3 (3.94 ha): 58 kg/ha saving = 228.52 kgs.
Field 4 (2.32 ha): 58 kg/ha saving = 134.56 kgs.
Total N savings = 1,537.88kg
Average price of N in 2022 = £747.50/tonne
Total Savings = £1,149.57
Environmental Benefits
Yara Estimates that every 1 kg of Nitrogen based fertilizer used has a Co2 footprint of 5.1kg
An average of 63kg N per ha was saved, resulting in a net C02 saving of 322kg/ha
