BioLogic Food Plot Tips: Soil Samples

We are going to take a soil test out in this field. It's typical winter food plot. We are going to plant it this summer, and there is something different than the dry grass that's in here. So we will spray and kill the current crop. So we will have a real clean seed bed to start off with and then prepare a seed bed. But, before we do anything, the first step we want to do is take a soil sample. Soil samples are extremely important and we don't want to just sample one place in a field, this is about an acre field, and we are going to take five or six samples out of this field, so it won't be the effect of this particular tree causing the soil to be one way, but ten feet over here we have a different acidity, because this tree wasn't shedding the water off these acidic leaves on the ground right here. When I take a soil sample, I take a shovel, and a clean bucket. It's real important to have a clean bucket because let's say, you had detergent or something in the bucket, that would make your phosphorus level extremely high, giving artificial reading. I would typically just do this to make myself a good five or six-inch deep hole, and then back off and just shave about a half inch section of dirt, and make a little section because what you really want to gather is the root zone. You want from about an inch or two-inches deep down to five-inches deep. That's what you want to test the soil quality and fertility of, because that's where your plants are going to develop the root system. That's where they are gaining their nutrients from. So I will just take a little bit of that, and that. Leave the top part, and make sure you pick all the vegetation out of there, stir it all up and we would repeat this process five or six times through the field. We don't want to get, maybe we have applied a little bit more fertilizer in the year past or tractor it in, the planting, and fertilizer it there at all. Stir it all up and take a sub-sample of that out, and that's what we would submit through our soil test. We have collected out several samples from the field. That's too much to send off to a lab, so what we want to do is take a sub-sample. I just want to stir everything up, make sure it's all equally represented that way. Just like blending, blending cookie dough or something. Then, two critical things to remember about collecting a soil sample that would be meaningful, is you have got to label each sample for the field you've collected it from. If you have five fields that you sampled and you don't label each one separately, you'll get results back from five fields, but you don't know which result correlates with which field. So the first thing I do is write my field name on the container. I am going to put my sample in. Second thing is, when you turn this into lab, you must tell them what you are going to plant in that field. For example, if you were going to plant a clover versus a big broad leaf plant, they would require different types of fertilizer to make each plant perform at an optimum level. So you have got to tell the lab and most labs allow you to make three plant choices with no extra charges. So even if you don't have your mind made up exactly what you are going to plant yet, you can list three different types of plants. You'll get three different recommendations based on the same soil sample. You just need to turn in about a pint of soil. I always prefer to put it in a brown paper bag or a box, because if you put it in an air-tight bag, it will usually mold and that might mess up your results a little bit, depending on the testing procedure you use. So I use a brown paper bag or a small box. I have got my bag labeled, and I am going to tell the lab what I am going to plant, so they can recommend appropriately to get the maximum yield of that plant.