MLSN Cost Savings After 10 Years

It has now been over 10 years since I first started using the MLSN guidelines. In that time I've written a ton about how I've tried to use it and how it has benefited my operation. A lot of people were, and still are skeptical of this "new" way of fertilizing grass but after a decade of use, I think it's safe to say that this way of fertilizing grass is probably good, especially for your budget. I've heard people say "your greens will have 8 weeks to live" and it is now over 500 weeks and they are doing just fine.

While many people (including many university professors) still confuse the MLSN with low nitrogen rates, the guidelines are actually intended to ensure that you have enough of the other nutrients in the soil and take the annual use rate (based on nitrogen rates) into account to ensure that you apply fertilizer to stay above the guidelines. They are not target (although I have used them as such) but are levels that you should not go below.

While a lot of the savings came from not having to apply as much potassium to large areas like our fairways, most of the savings came from a secondary effect of using the MLSN. Once I realized that I didn't need some nutrients, I wanted to customize my fertilizer blends that I applied to my turfgrass surfaces. This was done with the use of soluble fertilizer sources which are generally a lot cheaper than the blended granular fertilizers. Soluble fertilizer sources also allow you to apply rates infinitely low while still maintaining uniform coverage which is something that you cannot do with granular fertilizers.

The chart below shows the impact that the MLSN had when I started at my new course in 2019. The cost/ha before 2018 was in the range of about $1000 so the savings for today are still about 80% or $25,000 a year. Those kinds of savings can buy you a brand new modern sprayer on a 4wd diesel chassis every 3 years.

I've continued to refine my fertilizer application strategy to keep costs down even with extreme cost inflation for fertilizer in the past few years. In 2020 we had the lowest cost, but this was also not enough fertilizer for good turf quality. In 2022 we were able to maintain a good turf quality for a similar amount of money due to our new application strategy.

I'll discuss this strategy in a future post as well as the simplified approach to managing soil nutrient levels in my soils that I have developed over the past few difficult years.

Turfgrass speedo is still my most important tool for managing turf growth after 4 years.

It wasn't the easiest year for growing grass , but the conditions were still pretty good. Almost 4 years ago exactly, I came up with the idea of comparing actual clipping yields to the "ideal" clipping yield or the clipping yield adjusted using the Growth Potential Model . Since then, it has proved to be a much more useful tool to manage growth than I originally thought . It has been almost a decade since I started making observations on plant health and playability and how it relates to the clipping yield. I have been constantly searching for ways to get the growth rate right as often as I can and this tool seems to be the best way I have seen so far, and might ultimately, be the best way going forward. To prove this point I will discuss in a future post, the success I've had with pest control in the past few years (for the most part (Not withstanding the times where I think my greens are dead but they actually aren't...thanks T)). Never needed less There are

Do you have enough?

I recently discussed how we can use fertilizer ratios to simplify how much fertilizer we apply to help us keep above the MLSN guidelines . When we get a soil test done it is a static amount of nutrients found in the soil. Even if you are above the MLSN guidelines at the time of testing, it doesn't guarantee that you will remain at or above the guidelines as the grass grows and consumes nutrients. There is math that you can use to determine exactly how much nutrient you need to apply to ensure that you remain at or above the MLSN guidelines. For many, this is much too complicated. For that reason I made a quick cheat sheet to help you determine how much of each nutrient you can expect to use each year based off a few different annual nitrogen rates. Nutrient use is based primarily on nitrogen use so the left 2 columns are a few different nitrogen rates. The columns for each nutrient are in PPM and are designed to help you look at your current soil test PPM (mehlich 3) and determin

How to quantify nutrient content in liquid fertilizer

In a recent post, I discussed how it was actually cheaper to spray soluble vs granular fertilizer. What about if we use pre-mixed liquid fertilizer? How do we even figure out how much nutrient we are applying with pre-mixed liquid fertilizer? Before I learned that you could simply dissolve soluble fertilizer in water and apply it in a sprayer, I was a big user of pre-mixed liquid fertilizers. One of the issues I initially had was figuring out exactly how much of each nutrient I was applying. The math wasn't as straightforward is it was with granular fertilizers. It turns out, it's actually not that difficult but requires an extra step. First, we need to convert the liquid volume into a mass. Many products will have the product density displayed on the label or you can look in the Safety Data Sheet (SDS) for that information as well. No SDS? Should you be using products without an SDS? Even if this information isn't included on the label it is very easy to figure out. All

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