Grainews reader shares advice on fertilizer placement

Alf Erichsen from Botha, Alta., sent an email with a "philosophical thought" for me. I'm going to share his email with you as a reminder that truly new ideas are rare, and that sometimes it takes a long time for good ideas to sink in. Thanks Alf.

Here is Alf's email:

Most of us become so focussed on our own narrow world we lose track of time and space. For example, in the past 25 years in Canadian Prairie agriculture we've evolved air seeding. In the past decade we've tackled seed and fertilizer placement, ie. side banding and mid-row fertilizer placement. I'm including a quote  from "another world." See if you can guess. I've put in brackets our local word usage.

"In the best drills (seeding tools), a very important improvement has been made within the last few years, which consists in the use of separate coulters (openers) for manure (fertilizer) and seed. The manure is now deposited according to the mode preferred by the cultivator (farmer), not only from two to three inches deeper in the ground than the seed, but from ten to twelve inches in advance of it, so as to give the soil time to cover the manure, before the next coulters deposit the seed. On the old plan of depositing the seed and the fertilizer together down one pipe, an evil was liable to arise; when it was used with some of the more powerful artificial manures, the seed and the manure were too close together, and the manure was not dropped with certainty in its best position, under the seed."

The author is J.Allen Ransome, from England, and this is from his book titled  "The Implements of Agriculture." The book was published 166 years ago in 1843.