Corn growers seeking to increase the amount of nitrogen taken up by their crop can adjust many aspects of fertilizer application, but recent studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign show those tweaks don’t do much to improve uptake efficiency from fertilizer.
That’s because, the studies show, corn takes up the majority of its nitrogen — about 67% on average — from sources occurring naturally in soil, not from fertilizer, according to a university news release.
The evidence for soil as corn’s major nitrogen source came repeatedly over the course of four studies, the first published in 2019 and the rest more recently.
In all four studies, researchers in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at University of Illinois labeled fertilizers with a naturally occurring isotope of nitrogen, known as 15N, and applied it in the field at different rates, forms, placements and timings.
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