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.  🎩 

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.

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.

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.

I do all my own fertility recommendations as I've been working with these labs since 2008 and also spent many years working as a consulant.

The logan labs test is a mehlich 3 analysis which gives wildly high P numbers so we also use UMass (modified morgan) to get a better sense of available P. 

State labs have algos.

That’s smart to submit to multiple places to get them to check the work. Do you calculate your own mineral application rates or work with someone for mineral recommendations? It’s cool you have years of tests have you increased your OM?