What exactly is the relationship between soil nitrogen, corn yield and nitrogen loss? Most farmers would be forgiven for assuming a straightforward linear relationship: more nitrogen, more grain yield and, maybe, more loss.
 
That’s the assumption many nitrogen management models are based on, but it turns out there’s very little published science to back up that assumption.
 
In a recent paper leveraging a multi-year dataset from 11 experimental plots and on-farm trials around the state, University of Illinois scientists definitively established the relationship between soil nitrogen at different growth stages and corn yield. The results provide more precise ways to manage nitrogen for grain yield while lowering nitrogen losses.
 
“Technology nowadays moves very fast. There’s a lot of modeling tools out there to help growers match nitrogen to crop needs, but very little published data showing the relationship,” said Giovani Preza-Fontes, doctoral researcher in the Department of Crop Sciences at the U of I and lead author on the paper. “Our work shows soil nitrogen explains the majority (46% to 61%) of the variation in grain yield. It is a good predictor.”
 
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