Creating a nutrient budget will help you evaluate the effect of nutrient management on your fields’ sustainability and help you assess efficiency and improve resource allocation. The Nutrient Budgeting App (NBA) was developed to help with multi-year nutrient management planning, especially for producers that rely on biological nitrogen fixation and/or occasional inputs of manure or other soil fertility amendments. This multi-year approach to nutrient management planning can help to optimize production while decreasing nutrient loss to the environment by doing a better job of matching soil nutrients to crop needs.
The Nutrient Budgeting App will help you calculate whether nutrients are accumulating or being depleted from your fields over time. It makes it easy for you to add up the nutrients you are bringing onto your fields (including through N fixation by legumes) and subtract the nutrients that leave your fields to help you plan your crop rotations and soil amendments. The NBA is meant to be used alongside other nutrient management tools such as soil testing.
Whether you are an organic producer, transitioning to organic production or a conventional producer wanting to better understand how legumes in your rotation can help you reduce synthetic nitrogen use, the NAB will help you understand the efficiency and flow of nutrients in your fields.
The Nutrient Budgeting App was developed as part of the Prairie Organic Development Fund’s Canadian Organic Ingredient Strategy. Funding for the development of the Nutrient Budgeting was provided by:
Funding for the Prairie Organic Development Fund was provided by: