The banking metaphor of using your soil as a long-term nutrient bank, allowing you to store crop nutrients away for future use, should be resigned to the annals of history. In our view, and especially with phosphate, it is only a bank in the respect of locking up nutrients and throwing the key away – leaving you with a nutrient investment that you don’t have access to.
Continuing to think and act in this manner is one of the main causes of phosphate pollution in our waterways – because farmers and growers are guided by RB209 to keep adding phosphate to reach and/or maintain a phosphate index of two or more.
Our research (and that of many others) shows that while we keep adding phosphate, in many soil types more and more of it becomes locked up in largely insoluble forms that crops are unable to utilise within the growing season.
So, in essence, when it comes to phosphate and the RB209 index of two, it encourages us to remove phosphate, a non-renewable and finite resource, from mines around the world and dilute it into UK soils where it is in danger of lock up onto soil particles and minerals. In turn these particles may be washed into waterways through soil erosion caused by the increasingly frequent and heavy periods of rainfall being encountered both in the UK and elsewhere.
In our view, this advice is not only outdated by 50 years, but also both a financial and criminal waste of natural resources and no longer resonates with the current objectives set out for British Agriculture with regard to soil health, pollution and Net Zero, let alone efficiency and profitability.
Find out more about us here https://bit.ly/3TPqR4l