Nutrient sweet spot for optimal potato yields

To increase potato yield and quality, nutrients need to be carefully managed, taking into account what the plant requires and how applied elements interact with each other. Charles le Roux of Diagnosis and Recommendation Integrated System spoke to Lindi Botha about optimising nutrition for maximum synergy.

- Lindi Botha

Traditional soil analysis entails surveying what nutrients are available, knowing what the crop requires for optimal growth, and topping up elements as required.

But this method fails to take into account whether elements are plant-available or how they interact, often leading to increased nutrient applications that have little effect on the crop.

It’s a lose-lose situation in which farmers spend money on inputs that bring no value, and nutrient run-off creates further problems.

This is where the Diagnosis and Recommendation Integrated System (DRIS), used to interpret plant tissue analysis data and assess plants' nutritional status, can be of great value.

The benefit of DRIS over traditional plant analysis is that it helps identify imbalances, deficiencies, and excesses of plant nutrients by analysing the ratios between different nutrients, not just their individual concentrations.

While the system is not new, having been developed in 1973 by Dr ER Beaufils, formerly from the Department of Soil Science and Agrometeorology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, it is now gaining renewed interest globally.

FULLY INTEGRATED, PRACTICAL METHOD

Ronald Schroder, agronomist at DRIS and one of Beaufils's former students, was involved in much of the original research and has continued refining and expanding the system into what it is today. DRIS now combines soil, tissue, and sap analysis into a fully integrated, practical method that delivers real-time recommendations using modern fertilisers and foliar applications.

“It is the only system that presents both sap and tissue data in a single, easy-to-read graph, giving farmers a clear, visual understanding of both nutrient storage and immediate uptake at the same time,” says Charles le Roux, director of commercial and business development at DRIS.