Feeding soil for millet
I WROTE about the up coming surge in popularity of the humble millet crops in last week’s Rural Weekly edition. Continuing on with this theme is more on nutrition and some weed control.
I advised that 70kg per hectare of Nitrate nitrogen is required to grow a tonne per hectare of millet.
If you have been a regular reader of this column, you would recall that my learnings and practical advice on nitrogen placement needs plenty of thought. We have assumed for a long time that the percolating or infiltrating action of water through our soil takes our nitrate nitrogen on this
OBTAINING A STRONG AND EVEN MILLET STRIKE IS CRITICAL TO OVERCOMING GRASS WEEDS.
PAUL MCINTOSH
wetting front. That of course depends on several issues, like soil type for one. With loamy soil the wetting front will move downwards comparatively quickly into a dry profile.
The heavier the soil and the wetter the soil, the less or slower will our nitrogen front be in moving downwards into the soil to where our plant root system will be proliferating.
The actual moisture wetting will be 50 to 60 per cent quicker or deeper than the nitrogen movement for your own assessment. So my 70kg per hectare of N uptake needs to effective N in the developing root zone of any plant. Note I said uptake here and not just soil calculations in the mg per kg rating.
Research data on millet crops with phosphorous and potassium is fairly thin, however as our soils get older and more demands are placed on them, the need for replacement of these two relatively immobile nutrients, gets larger with all crops. So applying five to 10kg per ha of P as in MAP or DAP is good basic practice and no doubt in some older soil types, more of this element applied would be better. Added to that is potassium or K, also depleting from our various soil types around the country. Not that millet is a big user of K like maize is, however it is still a critical element in all our soils.
Sulphur is usually a minor part of our MAP/DAP and usual removal in millet crops is around 1.6kg per tonne. Zinc once again should be applied to the crop, if a paddock deficiency is known. You can get plenty of discussion in what way and what form to apply zinc to paddock or crops.
Weed control is tricky, however we basically have no registered grass control options in our millet crops, so driving down the grass weed seed bank pre plant is very important and then obtaining a strong and even millet strike is critical to overcoming grass weeds like barnyard and urochloa. Even feather op rhodes grass can be reduced by having narrow row spacing and substantial millet plants per square metre. More next week on slightly easier broadleaf weed control methods.