Updating Soil Analysis to Consider Microbial Influence with Rick Haney
Regenerative Agriculture Podcast
AEA Marketing
4.7 • 546 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2020
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rick Haney is a renowned researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the creator of the Haney Soil Analysis, an innovative extraction procedure to assess overall soil health and plant mineral availability. Today, John sits down with Rick to hear his story and discuss a future of agriculture centered around agronomic realities and biological processes.
Throughout the episode, John and Rick cover a wide array of topics:
- The journey Rick took to discover an improved system for analyzing soil health, eventually leading to the development of his namesake soil assay.
- How Rick's work and an emphasis on data can help growers save an average of $20 per acre in nitrogen applications.
- Over-fertilization and what soil respiration says about the fertility of a field.
- Rick's battle with calibrations and the industry's collective leaps in agronomic understanding since the 60's.
- The work of Dr. Richard Mulvaney, namely the Illinois Soil Test, and how it compares to Haney's soil nitrogen report.
- The shortcomings of mainstream agronomic research and the power of "listening to nature."
- The importance of using water and biological activity as the gauge of soil mineral release rather than acids and extractants to judge soil mineral content.
- Why many growers are routinely able to reduce Nitrogen and Phosphorus inputs.
- The importance of looking at real yields rather than soil test data as the sign of a well-functioning fertility program.
- The power of embracing new developments in ag research and the future of in-field sensors.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, friends. This is John, and this is the regenerative agriculture podcast, where we talk about the |
| 0:05.4 | agronomic science and cultural management practices that regenerate plant health, soil health, and |
| 0:12.1 | ultimately public health. My guest for this episode is Rick Haney, a name that you've probably |
| 0:18.2 | heard, or hopefully you have heard and are familiar with over the |
| 0:21.2 | last couple of years who developed the soil test that carries his name and a soil test that |
| 0:27.9 | I'm quite intrigued by. We've started using it on our farms that we do consulting work on. |
| 0:33.7 | And I wanted to have this conversation to learn more about how the assay came to be and what we can learn from it and to hear from Rick's perspective directly. |
| 0:44.0 | So, Rick, thank you very much for joining us and for sharing your wisdom. |
| 0:47.3 | Oh, glad to be here. |
| 0:48.9 | Rick, you've become very well known for the soil test that carries your name now in the last couple of years. |
| 0:55.3 | But what was the pathway that led you to developing that soil test? |
| 0:59.7 | What brought you to this point? |
| 1:01.8 | I get that question time to time. |
| 1:03.5 | And I grew up in Iowa as a kid. |
| 1:06.7 | And my grandfather farmed and, well, both my grandfather's farmed and so I was around agriculture a lot but |
| 1:13.2 | until we moved to Oklahoma when I was like 15 or 16 I ended up started working on farms |
| 1:20.2 | I had worked on farms in Iowa but I was young and I didn't you know couldn't do much but I went to work |
| 1:26.0 | for farmers and ranchers in Oklahoma, and I |
| 1:28.1 | watched them for years borrow a million dollars to fund their operations, and I watched just the |
| 1:35.8 | badgum devastating effect of the way we do agriculture on their ability to make any money. |
| 1:42.7 | And I always felt bad for them because it was like, |
| 1:45.8 | how can we help these guys? |
... |
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