Neal Kinsey shares wisdom from his decades of in-field experience and the principles he learned from Dr. William Albrecht
Acres U.S.A. I was just flipping through an old Acres U.S.A. desk reference from 1988 — from 35 years ago — and there was an article that you were quoted extensively in. You’ve been involved in this space for a long time! But for people who aren’t familiar with you, where did you get your start in all this, and how would you describe the trajectory of your career?
Neal Kinsey. The start, I suppose, was growing up on my grandfather’s, and then my father’s, farms here in southeast Missouri. We raised corn, soybeans, cotton and wheat — those were the four principal crops. My grandfather also raised a lot of musk melons and watermelons.
So that was my original start. I remember sitting on a pillow in my Grandpa’s big Chevy truck when I was four years old, and I got to drive. They didn’t have enough people to load the hay, so my uncles sat me on that pillow and pulled the throttle out with the truck in granny-low, and it just barely moved along, and they pointed out which way to go.
Acres U.S.A. And did you ever farm on your own, or have you been an agronomist your whole career?
Kinsey. No, I’m one of 12 children, and my dad said, “Can’t keep everybody in farming — you better go to the university and do some other kind of work.” He wanted me to be an accountant. I enjoyed accounting, but when I got to the university, I discovered that I didn’t like being inside. I realized that’s not really what I wanted to do. So, I got a degree in marketing in the school of business, and then I went on to University of Missouri to begin a master’s degree in food industry logistics. We were learning to work on how to move the food around.
The only trouble was that it was a hybrid course between the agricultural economics department and the school of business, and after one year they got into a disagreement as to how much of each type of course should be taken. And finally they just dissolved it, when I was not even halfway through.
In the meantime, though, that got me to the University of Missouri, and I worked in ag econ. I was an assistant to Dr. Kenneth Flood, who actually taught the major courses for food industry logistics. Consequently, I could always ask students who were taking agronomy about a certain practice we were using at the time. Farmers would take old areas that were just scrub timber — swampy areas — and would drain those out and plant them into soybeans. The first year they’d make 50 bushels, and the soil test would say you didn’t need anything — and we believed it, because that was 20 bushel better than anybody was averaging there.
But second year, the soil test still said you didn’t need anything, and it made 40 bushels. And the third year it made 30 bushel, and that still made more money for you than any other crop you could plant there — but as expenses rose, it wasn’t enough to pay all the bills. I would ask them, why did the soil test say you didn’t need anything — we went from 50 bushel to 40 bushel to 30 bushel, and the soil test at 30 bushel still said we didn’t need anything? Everybody just sort of shook their heads.
And finally, someone said, “You need to talk to Dr. William Albrecht.”
I didn’t know who Dr. Albrecht was. But come to find out, his office was on the first floor of Mumford Hall and my office was on the second.
He was professor emeritus of soils at that point — he was “at the end” of his career. This was in 1967. He had retired from teaching in 1958, but you’d have to call to make an appointment to see him. Not because he was exclusive — he was willing to talk to anybody — but because every half hour was full, from the time he got there in the morning until he left in the afternoon.
Acres U.S.A. Who were these people who were coming to see him? Were they farmers, or were they researchers?
Kinsey. It was all kinds of people. University researchers, people in the ag business. A lot of the organic farming advocates of the day would actually come to see Dr. Albrecht. That’s who many natural or organic farmers got their advice from, until he died in 1974.
It was not that he said, “I’m only going to advise organic farmers.” He just said, “This is public information. Everybody deserves it. Taxpayer money pays my salary. Everybody ought to have access to it.” That’s the way he would operate.
When I made the first appointment, I told him, “I’d like to talk about soybean yield,” and I told him the very same thing I just told you. “First of all,” he said, “Neal, I just want to assure you that I have experience in your area, because I’ve done a lot of work down there. But first, I’d like you to tell me about your family and how they farmed.” So I told him about my grandfather and father, and how the soils were heavy, black, Sharkey clay soils — we called them gumbo.
And then he asked, “What was your grandfather’s major cash crop?” Well, that was alfalfa. I hadn’t mentioned alfalfa up to then, but my grandfather raised alfalfa when I was really young. When he died, when I was eight years old, 12 or 13 counties in southeast Missouri — the flat areas — every one of them had an alfalfa mill to process alfalfa meal or feed pellets. By the time I graduated from high school, there was only one alfalfa mill left. Everybody had quit growing alfalfa.
But Dr. Albrecht knew this. He said, “Why did your grandfather quit growing alfalfa?” I said that he’d drive around and look at the alfalfa fields and watch the low places where water tended to stand — this is right up close to the Mississippi River. Every spring it would flood. And when the sour dock and the curly dock would start coming into the low places, he’d say, “When this stand stops being profitable, we’ll take it out, and we’ll plant soybeans” — because soybeans would produce better and make more money at that time than alfalfa.
Well, Dr. Albrecht shook his head, and he said, “Neal, if your grandfather and your father knew what I’m going to tell you now, alfalfa could be still their major cash crop. The problem was that you didn’t do a detailed enough soil test.”
I told him that we took our soil tests to the university extension office, and we’d get a recommendation from the university, and they said we didn’t need anything.
And he said, “Do you know why you got that test?”
I said, “No, sir — just because that’s what we thought we needed to know what to do.
He said, “No, you got that test because it was free.”
He asked what was on that soil test, and I told him pH, phosphorus and potassium, and he shook his head. He asked what the pH was, and I told him it was between 7.3 and 7.4. And he said that that pH was too high. He said, “If your pH is above 6.5, you have too much of something. If you have too much of something, you don’t have enough or something else. You can’t have too much of everything. What you need to know is what was causing that pH to be where it was. In that area, there are two problems: in that soil, magnesium levels are extremely high, and calcium is extremely deficient. And even though you had perhaps 500 to 700 pounds of potassium showing up on your soil test, you didn’t have enough, because that’s less than 2 percent on those heavy soils. If you don’t have 2 percent potassium, it’s always robbing you of productive potential.”
Later in my career, when I came back home and was working with those soils, right where I grew up, we had pH’s in the sevens, but we were deficient in calcium. The percentage of calcium was too low. So we put on between a ton of gypsum and a ton of limestone; on some fields it was two tons of limestone. And the yields went up by 15 bushels in one year.
You would think everybody would do that. I mean, that’s so easy to see. But they could not believe that lime would help when their pH was so high.
Acres U.S.A. Why is that? Why is soil balancing — specifically with calcium and magnesium —not adopted by growers?
Kinsey. There are probably a lot of answers to that. But to me, the biggest answer is because too many people read books that say it won’t work, and they don’t go try it. They just take what the book says. And as Dr. Albrecht used to always admonish, “Study nature, not books.” If you can go out in the field and do it, and it works, you have to believe the field over the book, right?
But many people don’t ever get to the point that they will experiment on a small area, to find out what happens. And for some people, even if they start out with a trial, by the time it gets to where they can do the test, they say “Oh, it was getting late in the season. We were afraid we wouldn’t get to harvest,” and they didn’t do the test. They didn’t do the comparison. In many cases, it is hard to do. But if you’re doing it on two or three fields, and all of a sudden those fields make 15 bushel better than the other — that’s not hard to see.
Acres U.S.A. What has changed over the decades? The basic principles haven’t changed since the ’60s or the ’70s, but what has changed in terms of what are you recommending today compared to when you started?
Kinsey. Well, the big difference is that everyone back then thought that we didn’t need to measure the micronutrients in the soil — that when you take care of the major elements and the secondary elements, then the micronutrients will take care of themselves — that there’s enough of them there in the soil. They thought that since you need so little — like six hundredths of a pound of something for raising a 150-bushel corn crop — that they didn’t need to worry about it.
Well, that wasn’t what happened. The guidelines were there; Dr. Albrecht already had guidelines for micronutrients. So within one or two years, I started to run micronutrients on all the soil tests.
Acres U.S.A. So those tests did exist back then, even to measure all the micronutrients.
Kinsey. The test that you really needed did. The test Dr. Albrecht used was designed to reflect that if you needed a certain amount of copper, then you could put the right amount of copper on. People would say, “You can’t tell me you can put five pounds of copper sulfate on and raise the copper level by 0.3 parts per million.” But it happened time after time after time. For iron, manganese and zinc, it reflects pound for pound what you need. And if you put on a material that really works and builds the level, the sulfates always work — unless you do something to counteract that, like putting on huge amounts of limestone or something. Let’s say you’ve done everything else, and you need 10 pounds of manganese to get it above the minimum. If you put 10 pounds of actual manganese from manganese sulfate on, it will get above the minimum, but it will take about 12 months before it shows it on the soil test.
In terms of other recommendations that have changed over the years, we are making a lot higher recommendations — whether it’s organic or conventional. About two thirds of our clients are some type of conventional agriculture and about one third are some type of organic. But we’ve found that even if you correct the soils, it doesn’t necessarily result in using less nutrients to maintain fertility. Maybe less fertilizer sometimes, because of the amount of yield you get for the amount of input. But as yields go up, the need for nutritional elements goes up along with it.
Acres U.S.A. What soil test do you typically recommend? And what soil test did Dr. Albrecht recommend?
Kinsey. Dr. Albrecht actually developed use of the tests that were used by the University of Missouri until the late 1970’s. When I say “developed,” I don’t mean that he didn’t work with other people. Dr. Albrecht was not somebody that just did everything himself. He would look at other people’s ideas and see if they worked or not.
For example, the lime test that he recommended was developed by Michigan State University back in the ’40s or ’50s. And he said, “Look — it works; we don’t need to invent a new test. If you do this correctly, it will show you how many pounds of calcium and how many pounds of magnesium is in there. And then if you look at the fineness of grind, that will tell you how available it’s going to be and even how soon it’s going to become available.”
But people still don’t use that test for limestone — because they’re not looking at how many pounds of calcium they need; they’re looking at what the pH is. If the pH is good, they think that calcium, or lime, has done what it’s supposed to do.
One of the advantages of meeting Dr. Albrecht and learning under him was that he’d already done this for 40 or 50 years. He’d started in the ’20s, and he learned as he went. By the time I met him in 1967, he had 50 years of experience in terms of what happens out in the field. He’d say, “This is what the number needs to be” and could define what’s deficient or good or excellent for each element.
He taught a private study course, which I was able to take. He was perhaps one of the first to utilize a university-type correspondence course. He would send a packet of reading material and essay questions. The great thing about it was, when we answered those tests, we were admonished to submit everything with double spaces, because Dr. Albrecht would write in between the lines. He was trying to make sure you knew what those basics were.
When I finished the course in 1973, I got a certificate from him, and a letter came with it that said, “Neal, you finished the course. I’ve taught you the basic foundation of soil fertility. Now go out and build on that foundation, because there’s a lot of other things you can learn from the field.” And boy, was that right. But he gave me the right foundation to build upon. And he said, “This says you’re an agronomist; but you really aren’t an agronomist. You have the materials, and to the extent that you can go out and use them, you can become an agronomist. But don’t count yourself an agronomist just yet.”
Acres U.S.A. Can you speak a bit about the role of soil biology? We’ve learned a lot more about that in the last couple of decades. How has that impacted your thinking about agronomic methods and practices?
Kinsey. I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn that Dr. William Albrecht was hired at the University of Missouri as a soil microbiologist. When he came, the first major assignment he had was to teach the farmers in the state of Missouri how to use rhizobium inoculants — the proper ones for the proper seed. You need one for alfalfa, a different one for clover, and so on.
Up until recently, the state of Missouri was number two in the U.S. for cow-calf operations; Texas was the only state that had more cow-calf operations. So, the university was looking at pastures and hay and was trying to see what it could do to help these farmers.
This was really new in 1917 or 1918 — nobody was doing it — and Dr. Albrecht made a presentation to the agronomy society on his work with rhizobium bacteria. He would say that we have to look at the soil, and we have to make sure the conditions are right for the biology — for the plant root and everything that supports it. This is what he would always stress: the biology is what we’re looking for. But you can’t just put biology on there, or leave it alone, and think that it’ll take care of itself. What does it take to get it to do its best?
This is what he looked at. He’d say that we have to have the right environment for the biology. We need the right structure in the soil, the right amount of air and water and minerals and so forth. And, he said, how do you get that? The only way is to use the chemistry to affect the structure, which then builds the environment for the biology.
This was his goal from the first. Because people thought those inoculants were going to solve the farmers’ problems. And on certain farms, when the farmer used the right inoculant, that was exactly the answer he needed. But on other farms, the inoculants didn’t help at all. That’s when Dr. Albrecht started looking into what it was that gets these rhizobium to work properly. And he found that when you got rhizobium to work properly, so did the other types of organisms in the soil. When you gave them the environment, that’s when they started to really do what they needed to do.
Other farmers in Missouri were dairymen, and sooner or later their legume fields were gonna go into corn silage. And all of a sudden, the farmers started seeing that not only do the legumes do better where they’d done all this, but so did the corn silage and all the other crops. Yes, the goal was to build the environment for the biology, but in doing so, it improved everything.
Acres U.S.A. That’s really interesting. I think there’s the perception that the Albrecht method is very chemistry focused, but it’s helpful to hear you say that it’s all in the service of helping the biology to flourish — and ultimately, the plants to flourish.
Kinsey. This is really what Dr. Albrecht’s goal always was: feed the soil, and let the soil feed the plant. And I have to say that from the very first, almost without exception, when you go and tell someone, “This is what you really need to do to correct this soil,” they’ll say, “I can’t afford that.” Well, how many years did you spend not correcting it — and now all of a sudden you think you’re gonna be able to make that up in one year, and it’s not going to cost you anything?
I have seen some soils — Callaway County, Boone County, on up into northwest Missouri; and in the area of Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and there is an area over by Torrington, Wyoming, and some other places as well — and those soils already have the right percentage of calcium and magnesium. When you have that, all of a sudden it gets so much easier, because you don’t have to do some of the things that go against the grain of what people have been taught.
Acres U.S.A. What would you say about the idea of — instead of feeding the soil to feed the plant — directly feeding the plant via foliar feeding? Is that something you recommend these days?
Kinsey. We do recommend foliar feeding, and we have since way back when. If you have a small lack, foliar feeding works really well. If you have a moderate lack, foliar feeding will help, but generally will not take care of the problem. And if you have a serious deficiency, we’ve tried it, and you generally just can’t put enough on to make up the difference.
The element I’m thinking of is manganese. Not a lot of soils are deficient in manganese, but you find some that are severely deficient. And I’ve never found a soil that’s severely deficient in manganese that we can go in and correct with just using foliars. Now if it’s barely deficient — just borderline — you can do that.
I met a consultant in Australia who worked with dairies, and he used Dr. Albrecht’s program from the time he started. He used to say that foliar feeding was just like with humans. If there’s nothing wrong with us, we can sit down at the table and eat whatever we want, and we’re fine. But if we get sick, or we need something that we can’t get from food, then we have to be fed it intravenously. It costs a lot more, but if we need to do that, we can. Well, if you’re already in the trap, foliar feeding may cost quite a bit more comparatively.
Rice and zinc is a good example. Rice is very sensitive to zinc deficiency. We had never grown rice and didn’t know a lot about it; it was grown down closer to the Arkansas border. But Dr. Albrecht would always say that if the test showed less than six parts per million zinc, you had a zinc deficiency, and it would pay to put zinc on because it’s necessary for moisture absorption. Well, in rice — which may be standing in water — it’s necessary for more than that. If you have less than six parts per million zinc, the rice will start to turn brown on the tips of the leaves just after it starts growing. Just about the time you need to come in and put a second application of nitrogen on, you’ll get what’s called bronzing of the tip. That’s a zinc deficiency. And that soil is truly deficient in zinc; it’ll be below six parts per million.
Let’s say it’s 5.5 ppm, and we put on 10 pounds of zinc sulfate. You fly it on with the nitrogen, with water standing on the rice, and the bronzing of the tip goes away. Or you can put on 10 pounds of zinc oxysulfate, which is cheaper; or you can use zinc chelate, which takes very little. But when you add up what it costs — and the cost is a little bit more for zinc sulfate — that 10 pounds of zinc sulfate will raise that zinc level above 6 ppm and it’ll stay there five to seven years. But with the zinc oxysulfate, you have to do it every year. The same with zinc chelate — you have to do it every year; it does not build the levels up in the soil.
This is what Dr. Albrecht was looking at: what do we do to get the levels in the soil so that micronutrients don’t have to be used as a foliar? Now, we have clients who’ve balanced their soils well, and they get a real dry year or a real wet year, and if they’re doing leaf analysis, and something shows up missing, foliars will work.
But growers need to use foliars correctly. I’m thinking of an example with soybeans in northwest Ohio. I was up there with a client once, and we were driving along, and everybody was spraying manganese sulfate on their soybeans. We drove by and saw a farmer spraying a field of beans, and it was lunchtime, and we watched him turn and head for the house when he got to the end of a row. I thought, “I guess he’ll see his tracks when he comes back and he’ll know where to start after lunch.” We happened to be driving by there again just before one o’clock, and it was green right up to the line where he sprayed. In one hour, you could tell where he sprayed that manganese sulfate. He didn’t even have to look for his tracks.
A lot of farmers were doing that, but they all quit because it didn’t show enough difference in yield. The reason it didn’t make any difference in yield was that they just put enough on to green up the crop. They would have needed to do that three or four times before they got enough to make the kind of difference to affect yield.
We find this all the time in tree crops. You can’t just put on boron once and think you’re done. Or manganese or copper or zinc. It takes time.
Acres U.S.A. Would sap testing help with that? Growers can see a green up, but if they get the results back from a sap test, they could see that the numbers have gone back down.
Kinsey. I think that if you want to start to use the sap test, you need to go and learn under somebody who knows what those numbers mean.
Even before the sap test existed, though, I had a client in Michigan who grew conventional and organic apples and cherries. He did soil samples in late autumn and sent them to us, but it was too late to do anything. So, we made the recommendations, and he had quite a few deficiencies in micronutrients in some areas — like he had one orchard of Jonathan apples, and I said, “You must have trouble getting size on them.” And he said, “For 20 years!” It was because he wasn’t using boron. In other areas he needed boron and also manganese, copper and zinc.
It was spring by the time he would be able get out there and start putting all this on, and the buds would already be coming out on the trees. He said, “Is that going to be in time to get these trace elements on, for them to work properly?” And I said, “Well, probably not. It’d have been better if you’d gotten them on in the autumn beforehand. What I suggest is just as soon as you have leaves on those trees that are fully mature, take a leaf sample.” And the leaf samples showed the same deficiencies as the soil test.
So, we made a foliar application. And about four weeks later he did another leaf analysis. He did that on May 1, June 1, July 1 and August 1. On the first of May, he still needed all of the trace elements. On the first of June, he still needed all of them. On the first of July, I don’t remember which one, but he could skip one — it was showing to be high enough in the leaf. The first of August, two of them were still short in the leaf — even after four foliar applications.
What I’m saying is that that year he was short; but now he’d put on the micronutrients, and the next year both the soil test and the leaf test showed that his micronutrients were up where they needed to be.
The point that I’ll make in terms of leaf analysis is that you have to be careful about sulfur and micronutrients. I believe leaf analysis does a good job on nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium and magnesium, but with sulfur and trace elements, many times a leaf analysis will tell you that your levels are good to excellent, when a soil test is showing they’re still short.
It’s not a good idea to use a soil test to tell how to treat the plant. And it’s not a good idea to use the plant test to know how to treat the soil. Use a soil test to show what the soil needs and use a plant test to show what the plant needs. And there are very few exceptions to that. One exception is when your magnesium is high on a soil test. When your magnesium is too high on a soil test, the plant will be deficient in magnesium — just like it is when it’s too low. When you see a soil test that shows your magnesium is too high, that’s not telling you that you don’t need magnesium — it’s telling you that you have so much magnesium in the soil that it’s going to interfere with what the plant can take up. I don’t think it’s the magnesium; I think it’s that magnesium disperses the clay particles in the soil, and that reduces the pore space, and when you reduce the pore space, you reduce the aeration. Now the microbes that need air in order to do their jobs are restricted.
Acres U.S.A. What’s your outlook for the future of ecological agriculture? You’ve been doing this a long time; have you seen progress over the years? Are things better now than when you started?
Kinsey. I’ll just say it this way: I’ve seen progress in many areas. In terms of agriculture overall, and using the Albrecht system, yes, there’s progress there.
What gives me hope is that there are a lot of new, young minds that are coming into agriculture who are beginning to question some of the “old” standbys. It’s always good to question things. I have a grandson that’s working with me, and I encourage him to do this. He’ll say, “Have you ever thought about this?” And we’ll sit down and work through it and talk about why we do it one way, or why we might do it another way.
But in terms of ecological agriculture, I think people are starting to concentrate on it, but I always come back to one thing: too many people are looking for one answer — one silver bullet that’s gonna solve everything. And there is not something that solves everything. One man’s food is another man’s poison. One soil’s food is another soil’s poison. Even to the extent of things like cover crops — which are great — and compost — which is great. But cover crops don’t solve extreme deficiencies. Cover crops will help to conserve what you’ve got, in order to help grow the next crop. But if you’ve got something that’s a severe limitation, I don’t believe cover crops will take care of that in 20 years, or maybe even 40 years.
On the other hand, if you’re using compost and manures, I’ve had farmers say, “We don’t want to take compost from anyplace; we just want to use what’s from our own operation.” Well, whatever is deficient in your soil is also going to be deficient in your compost. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
What we tell clients is to measure what you have, determine what you need, and then find what it is that you can use to supply those needs — without overdoing something else. Because every time you put on too much of one thing, most of the time now you’re causing problems for something else. In terms of compost and manure, that’s often driving the P and K up so high that it starts tying up and blocking out micronutrients, which is necessary for a good, balanced food source.
Overall, I think agriculture is making good moves toward that. I wish we could do a whole lot more in terms of the natural side, rather than thinking that if you have a problem, you just go out there and kill everything. That doesn’t solve the problem. It just comes back. We’re just trying to doctor it up.
Acres U.S.A. How can we overcome the silver-bullet mentality?
Kinsey. Proper education.
An old friend of mine, Dr. Jim Childs, worked for USDA as a senior pathologist for citrus research. He lived in Florida, and he sent all his soil samples to us in Missouri because he said nobody else gave soil sample results that told him what he really needed to do in the field.
And one time he called me because one of the agronomists at the university disagreed with what I told a farmer to do. Well, it all worked out — if you’re careful about what you do, it’ll work. But Jim told me, “Neal, don’t sue that guy.” And I wasn’t intending to — I’ve never sued anybody. And he said, “The university — the government — will always win. They’ve got so many resources. I’ve seen the USDA spend $100,000 to prove they didn’t make a $10 mistake. They can’t be wrong.”
Then he said, “What you do is, you go to those farmers, and you teach the farmers one by one.”
Now, there’s an advantage to that and a disadvantage. When you teach farmers one by one, the farmers that are really good will listen — they’ll do it, and you’ll get to work with the cream of the crop.
But the thing I’ve found in so many of those cases is that you train the farmer — but who’s coming along to take that farmer’s place? We need this in university education. And universities need to go out and prove it. I would say that Tim Reinbott at the University of Missouri is one of the men that’s actually doing it. And there’s a few other places in the world that are doing it too.
Acres U.S.A. And how will the land grant universities and the extension services start teaching these things? It seems like many of those educators are so in league with agribusiness — there isn’t really much opposition to the herbicides and the pesticides at those institutions. How does that start to change?
Kinsey. I think that’s one of the hardest questions we face. The only way that starts to change is for people to go out and begin to take a look into it. We have the technology. It can be done. I’m not a biochemist — all I can do is go out and see what works in the field. But, for example, if you have cutworm in your corn, I know what’s wrong. I can tell you right quick — and there might be some other things wrong too. If you have calcium less than 60 percent saturation, that’s where the cutworm is going to be the worst. You get that calcium up where it ought to be and they don’t come out.
Some farmers only check their soil over three or four years because that’s what the university recommends. Every farmer is the boss — they’re the managers; we’re just advisors. It’s easy to talk a farmer into doing a soil test. It is not easy to get them to do what they need to do.
If a farmer uses the tests and does the program, generally it’s going to work out. And if things don’t improve, there’s a good reason why. It’s almost never something that’s way off. There’s a good, logical reason the program didn’t work at first; it’s just a matter of sitting down with the farmer and asking why this happened and adjusting. Again, it goes back to measuring.
But how do we get the universities to do this? My only hope is that with the move toward cover crops and things of this nature, that people will start to realize, “If we have this particular weed, why is it there?”
For example, we have common amaranth — redroot pigweed. I used to not know this was the case, but now anytime I see redroot pigweed, I know it’s a phosphate deficiency. I don’t care what the phosphate test says — you don’t have enough phosphate, in the right form, in that field! I used to think redroot pigweed was also a result of a severe excess of phosphorus. And the reason I thought that was because we used to sample pastures that had this weed, and phosphorus was always high.
Then I learned that I was sampling the pastures the wrong way. You don’t sample pastures while the cattle are walking around on it, because they have flecks of manure in between their hooves, and if you get one little fleck of manure in your sample, it’s gonna make that phosphorus and potassium look extremely high. Come back next year and check it at a time when the cattle aren’t in that pasture. We started finding out that those soils weren’t in excess of phosphorus — they were deficient. It’s just a matter of sampling properly.
To me, that’s where we have to start — getting a soil sample that people know they can count on. It doesn’t have to be the one we use, although if the government passed a law tomorrow that said everybody had to use a certain soil test, I’d have to run two tests — theirs and the one I’ve been using in the field for 50 years, because that’s the one I understand; I know what those numbers mean. When you build on the experience you already have, it’s sort of like putting a puzzle together.
And we’re still finding verification of Dr. Albrecht’s answers. The amazing thing to me is the number of years that have past, and that time after time, what he said would happen shows to be true. I expect that Dr. Albrecht would say, “Well, maybe you haven’t seen it happening till now. But there it is.”
