About the project

Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association (OSCIA) approved a research project in early 2024, to be undertaken by the Heartland SCIA.

Objectives:

• To establish critical leaf tissue test levels in soybeans for micro-nutrient (boron, iron, manganese and zinc) sufficiency and boron toxicity.
• To provide a uniform set of high-resolution images for micro-nutrient deficiencies visible in soybean leaves.
• To evaluate the ability of biological nitrogen fertilizer applications to compensate for reduced atmospheric nitrogen fixation in soybeans under drought stress.

Relevance and benefit:
There is tremendous interest in the agricultural community on the role bio-stimulants could play in growing high yielding crops with fewer inputs. This project thus aims to provide much needed guidance on the economics and agronomics of various micro-nutrients used by soybeans as well as feedback on the potential benefits, and a comparison of various nitrogen fertilizers available in Ontario.

If this project is successful, in future work the digital photographs of leaves with known micro-nutrient deficiencies will be used to attempt to develop an AI image analysis model that can be incorporated into a phone app and used to diagnose soybean micro-nutrient deficiencies in the field.

Treatments:

• Envita – foliar application
• Utrisha N – foliar application
• Cell Tech Peat and Liquid – seed application
• NResponse – foliar application
• Urea/Puryield – soil application
• Megafol – vegetative foliar application
• YieldON – reproductive foliar application
• Megafol + YieldON – respectively reproductive and vegetative foliar application
• Control: No treatments applied