It's soil testing season, if you didn't pull samples in the fall, now is a great time to get analysis ahead of the spring.

We collected ours yesterday and posted them in the mail today; sending samples to both Logan Labs (https://www.loganlabs.com/) and our local soil lab at UMass Amherst.

Thoughts on testing below.

Growing veggies for the fine folks of Southeastern Massachusetts, w/ a focus on nutrient quality. Always interested in the evolution of digital payments.  🎩 

We've used Logan since we started the farm in 2008.  

They use a Mehlich-3 analysis which is Albrecht aligned for folks putting weight into a BCSR (Base Cation Saturation Ratio) approach, they also offer saturated media extract testing for high fertility soils and/or in season analysis.

For commercial growers, we recommend testing anytime you need to make a fertility decision where analysis will help you make a more informed decision.  This often saves you money.  For many that is once a year, but it depends on your soils, fertility program, and prior experience with a crop.

The BCSR approach can be a bit misleading if you farm light soils (low CEC), which struggle to hold enough cations to grow a crop - especially Potassium.  Even if our soils are in balance, we often find a need for supplementing Potassium on our coastal soils here in New England.

Looking forward to the season ahead.

I like that Logan offers a test which provides you with cobalt, molybdenum, selenium, and silicon levels, which are often overlooked by public labs.

The reason we use the UMass test (Modified Morgan) is the Mehlich-3 acid gives high P readings which aren't reflective of spring availability.  UMass is better for this.