With input prices, and in particular fertilizer prices, rapidly increasing in recent months it is more important than ever to be keeping a close eye on nutrient use on your farm. To help you keep track of these figures we are pleased to announce that we are launching nutrient management as part of our farm work and input tracking tools. This will work for inorganic fertilisers such as Urea and organic fertilisers such as slurry.

You can set the nutrient content of the fertilizers that you are using on your farm so that you can track applied quantities of NPK and other micronutrients. This will allow you to:

• Record the quantities of nutrients applied per job
• Use target nutrient requirements to calculate the quantity of fertilizer required

You can set nutrient percentages for any new fertilizer inputs that you set up and you can edit existing fertilizer inputs which are set up on your farm. If you update your existing fertilizers you will be able to see applied nutrient figures for all your existing jobs. 

To make things quicker for you we have added some pre-populated fertilizers which you can use but you can of course set up your own to fit your system.

The next step for this will be to add in reporting so that you can track the total quantity of nutrients applied per field as well as per job. We understand that this is key for planning fertilizer applications and to provide evidence for assurance schemes that your applications are within the permitted limits. 

Setting nutrient content of fertilizers

When you go to create an input, either as part of Field Job creation or from Farm Settings, if you select the type fertilizer you will now see a nutrient section where you can enter the percentage of each nutrient. 

By default this shows the most common nutrients such as Nitrogen, Potassium and Phosphorus but you can click on the arrow next to ‘show micronutrients’ to add elements such as Boron, Copper or Magnesium. 

You can only need to fill in the ones that the fertilizer contains, all the others can be left blank.

There is also a pre-populated list of some of the most common ones. 

Planning application rates

When you enter input rates for fertilizers which have nutrient content set up you will see additional rows for each of the nutrients in that fertilizer. You can:

1. Enter your target quantity of a nutrient to be delivered based on plant requirements (in the example below 120kg N) and have the quantity of fertilizer required calculated.
2. Enter the planned quantity of fertilizer to be applied and it will show the quantity of nutrients that will be delivered. 

Checking nutrients applied on a Field Job

When viewing the inputs on a Field Job you will see additional rows under fertilizers showing the nutrients applied. It also shows the nutrient percentages of the fertilizer next to its name.

You can find full instructions for how to use these new tools in our support documentation.

Monitor Nutrients applied per field

Use the Nutrient Report in the Reporting section of the web app to track nutrients applied per field. You can filter the report to change which nutrients are displayed or to only show particular fields.

Click on a field row to expand it and see the individual Field Jobs where fertilizer was applied.

We hope you will find this new feature useful. As always we are keen to to hear what you think and your suggestions for how we can make it even better. You can get in touch with us by email to support@fieldmargin.com

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