Don’t Lose Young Crops to Salt Burn
Virtually all fertilizer materials are salts. And while fertilizer can make an enormous, positive difference in the quality of your crops, it can also sometimes cause salt burn.
Salt burn is what happens when the concentration of salt in the soil is so high, the water content of your crops’ cells flows out of the plant and into the soil. It’s a natural reaction to unbalanced salt levels and can unfortunately damage or even kill your plants. One way to avoid this problem is choosing a fertilizer with a low salt index number.
Damaged Root with SUL4R-PLUS
Fertilizer salt index is a measurement of the salt concentration induced in a soil solution. Continuous fertilizing with high salt fertilizer products causes the soil solution to become salty, which extracts the available water from the soil solution, thus robbing roots of valuable moisture. Values range from 1 to 100, with 100 being pure sodium nitrate. The higher the number, the more likely a fertilizer is to burn your crops. This makes it easy to understand, since the number is directly tied to the potential for damage.
Seedlings are particularly vulnerable to salt burn. Since they have a higher water content than more mature plants, they are more likely to lose that essential water to soil with a high salt index. When you choose a fertilizer with a low salt index, your soil is better able to offer seedlings the minerals and nutrients they need to thrive without causing salt burn.
Undamaged Root with SUL4R-PLUS
While you’re considering fertilizer for your fall fill, remember to check the salt index. SUL4R-PLUS fertilizer has a salt index number ranging from 5 to 8, which is unlikely to cause salt burn. This compares to a salt index number in the 70s and 80s for nitrogen- and ammonium-based fertilizers.
To learn more about salt index and salt burn, check out our Salt Index and Fertilzier Burn fact sheet.
These drone pictures show sulfur-deficient corn in a field trial near Franklin, IN. The producer applied strips at three different rates of SUL4R-PLUS fertilizer (left to right: 100 lb/a, 150 lb/a, and 200 lb/a). By increasing their sulfate rates during their season, they saw an increase in yield and overall crop health.
SUL4R-PLUS fertilizer provides a continuous source of plant-available sulfate and calcium throughout the growing season. Some other sources/forms of sulfate or sulfur become unavailable over time, or, in some cases, are never available to the crop at all. Having plant-available calcium and sulfate available throughout the growing season also means you will optimize the uptake of other critical nutrients, including nitrogen, phosphates, potassium, and magnesium.
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