Best Foliar Fertilizer For Cotton

Mulvaney is a uf ifas cropping system specialist and glen harris is a uga soil specialist.

Best foliar fertilizer for cotton.

In areas where you think the cotton is not severely stunted you may want to apply some foliar fertilizer to replace some leaching and de nitrification losses. Jennifer and i have been getting questions about foliar feeding cotton. Foliar kno 3 applied at 5 to 7 day intervals resulted in significant yield increase over the untreated plots in 1995. I have received questions about a lot of different foliar fertilizers.

Don t feed when. Petiole testing is the best way to tell whether you need to foliar feed cotton. Low volume not pivots. A valuable feature of petiole testing programs is that weekly sampling tracks nutrient level trends and allows the detection of deficiencies or excesses up to two weeks in advance.

Not all nutrients feed well. Editor s note michael j. Those plants will not take up foliar fertilizer until they get some oxygen and start recovering. Below are some general guidelines and rules of thumb to follow as you use foliar fertilizer to help you finish the season.

Currently there are a number of commercially available fertilizer additives that are designed to improve the uptake efficiency of p and k fertilizers. The amount of water applied by pivot essentially washes the fertilizer off the leaves making this essentially a soil applied fertilizer. Recent work in central and gulf coast areas of texas has demonstrated the importance of cotton k nutrition spiegelhauer et al 2014. Can i apply foliar fertilizer by pivot.

Effect of method and time of potassium application on cotton lint yield better crops vol. In most situations the best strategy to avoid k deficiency is to 1 soil test 2 apply the recommended k fertilizer at planting and 3 consider foliar feeding k during peak bloom. Preplant applications of k fertilizer and in some cases mid season foliar applications are effective in correcting deficiencies. If you re managing 1 bale ac cotton the extra expense of foliar fertilization won t be worth it.

Supplement to a good soil applied program. And if the soil is saturated cotton will need to recover somewhat before it can effectively take up foliar applications.