Seed and Fertilizer per Acre Calculator

A calculator that handles seed and fertilizer per acre When the ground gets soft and it’s time to pull out the planter, you’re faced with one dilemma: How much seed will you need across all of your fields?

You’ve got soil test results, the field map, and remembered what agronomist said about applying nitrogen. But there’s no time to break out calculator and figure how many pounds per acre are needed from seeds per pound, factoring in germination loss and adding a ten percent overage to account for headlands.

How to Use the Seed and Fertilizer Calculator

On a hectic morning, a seed/fertilizer per acre calculator does just that. It’s not really that hard to do the math. You can multiply a rate times acres… anybody could do that.

The trick is noticing when reality in the field differ from what the plan expected. In other words it’s different planning corn versus soybeans than it is wheat vs. Alfalfa. Corn are a population product (you think about how many seeds there are) while wheat is more a weight product (you’re thinking about pounds of material). Treat one as if it were the other and you’ll either be wasting money or end up with sparse stand.

The calculator has toggles that allow you to switch back and forth between population and pounds so you don’t have to guess what metric you should of used for the crop you’re working with.

Your seed budget matters a lot when it comes to germination. If you’re buying 92 percent, it sounds good. But that means you’re getting 8 percent fewer viable seeds than you think you are. Most of us don’t factor this in until we have a patchy field because the stand wasn’t good enough.

The tool uses the true germination rate from actual bag instead of average for that variety. It then scales that rate up to the desired population. It’s a pain to do manually, but makes the difference between whether you’ll get a crop at all or whether it will need replanting.

It’s complicated. There is fertility planning which depends on condition of your soil before you add any fertilizer. Then there is actual application of that fertilizer. And what do you know? You need to subtract soil credits for phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium from your target before you size up your blend.

Why? This helps avoid over-applying. Subtracting the amount of credit you have (if the phosphorus test is high, if you had a legume crop last year that left some nitrogen behind) will give you your desired balance to size the fertilizer mix. In other words: Don’t just buy and apply fertilizer blindly because it’s spring.

With this tool, you can plug in your credits so you’re buying only the difference, and filling a gap. This is an efficiency-minded exercise, because not all pounds of nitrogen that are purchased end up in the plants. Placement issues, tie-up issues and volatilization losses may leave you with only eighty-five percent of nutrients going to work. Better account for that loss initially instead of feeding crop short later on.

The last area of friction is the bag counting. Sure you can calculate a rate with the best of theories, but if you order by that decimal you’ll be out of materials on final ten acres. It’s not an option, rounding up to the next unit or whole bag are just part of the game.

Knowing exactly what you are buying can be seen in the blend analysis on the page. What do 50-pound bags looks like? What about a load from the tender truck? Your logistics change more than the science. Until you limit the variables, it’s all guessing games.

You need to get to the point where you trust that the load will fill the field. You shouldn’t have to worry about dropping a zero but can just trust that what goes in comes out. This happens because you’ve locked down your efficiency, your credits, and your germination.

Finish planning, head outside and let the equipment work.