An easier way to measure crop green area index

Due to recent warm weather some crops have started to grow, more noticeably oilseed rape. Because of the mild weather and less waterlogging there has been quite a lot of mineralisation. Crops have been able to utilise this supply of nitrogen in the soil hence why crops are noticeably green, especially barley. 

Using Yara’s ImageIT app you can see how much nitrogen your crop of oilseed rape, wheat or barleyshas taken up to better adjust your spring nitrogen applications. This saves a lot of time when compared to cutting out meter squares of crop to work out the GAI of oilseed rape, or counting cereal tillers. With ImageIT all you need to do is take a minimum of 5 crop pictures for the app to then measure ground cover and the greenness of the crop. You get your results back within a minute detailing the fresh matter of the crop and the nitrogen uptake in kg N/ha.

So if you have a forward crop of oilseed this spring, which has taken up more nitrogen in the autumn/winter than usual, then you are likely to cut back on the nitrogen rate. Is this at the expense of sulphur? If you already have your NS/NPKS fertilizer on-farm then you won’t want to change that grade now, but there is another solution. If your sulphur rate is down then you can always apply foliar sulphate before green bud to top up. YaraVita Thiotrac 300 contains sulphur in the immediately plant-available sulphate form and is applied at 5-10L/ha before flowering.