Winterize your farm

Winterization Program Should Coincide with Home Preparations

By now, you probably have located your Carhartt’s, lit the pilot on your furnace, and received your first shipment of LP or Propane. In short, you are ready for the winter ahead. Have you taken the same steps with your fields? Just as the shorter days and longer nights have signaled to you that winter is just around the corner, the decreasing sunlight has triggered built in responses in nature; that is why leaves are changing color and will soon drop, why flowers are becoming rare, and why animals are busy gathering food for the winter. It’s all about storing up energy for the cold days ahead. Physiologically, inside your perennial and fall seeded crops, changes are taking place that make winterization critical.

The limited hours of sunlight, not temperature, are what starts the process. The leaves, which served so well as solar panels, throughout the growing season, are no longer necessary. The plant, in order to be efficient, withdraws the chlorophyll from the leaves in order to concentrate the life blood at its heart. The plant is far from dormant at this point. In fact, now is the time that energy is being stored up and concentrated in the root zone. For most of the country, you have until about the first week of December to assist this natural process. It is this storage that will allow your crops to emerge in the spring ready to go and grow. It is this activity, though, that puts your plant at the greatest risk in spring.

As the days lengthen in the spring, the plant begins to emerge, expending most of the stored energy on top growth. Spring frosts represent stress that the plant likely does not have the energy to overcome. It is this spring emergence, without the necessary resources, that leads to ‘winterkill’. That is the purpose of winterization: To give your crops their best shot at surviving cold rains, harsh winds, and frosts.

In winter, unlike spring and summer fertilization, your goal is to develop the root structure. The preferred roots are not thick long tap roots that are more likely to rupture as the frost line drops deeper into the soil, but the fine hair-like roots which are thinner and more flexible. To accomplish this with most crops, look for fertilizers with less “N” (less than 3%) and more “P” and “K”, to enable you to grow the plant beneath the soil line without pushing top-growth, making your crop more susceptible to freeze-damage. Another difference is the time available to get the fertilizer into the root zone. That is why liquid fertilizers, foliar applied or drenched in the root zone, are so beneficial. Foliar fertilizers will move within the plant at a rate of six inches per hour without degrading, evaporating, leeching, or running off. A product, like Monty’s Liquid Fertilizer, is ideal because not only does it provide the nutrients needed, in a readily available form, but also contains Humic molecules, further enhancing the rate of absorption and helping to strengthen cell walls to protect against winter kill. For pastures and alfalfa look for a product with a slightly higher amount of nitrogen so that the crop will be ready to take off in the early spring with the strength and energy it needs to withstand any long-term damage from frost. By giving your alfalfa the energy it needs now it will green-up by as much as three weeks faster, depending on your growth zone. With application rates as low as 16 ounces to the acre, winter fertilization with Monty’s Plant Food may be the cheapest insurance policy available.

Now, while the days are getting shorter and your sleeves are getting longer, is the time to head to the field one last time and give your crops what they need to survive the winter. If you do so, you will be rewarded for your time and effort next spring by a healthier, more rapidly developing crop. We cannot cheat time, nor can we alter natural patterns of sunlight and dormancy. We can, however, work with those systems, plan for them and act accordingly so that we are no longer at the mercy of them.