CVA's Commitment to Water Quality: Advancing Nitrogen Efficiency for a Sustainable Future

Concerns about water quality related to nitrogen are very important to Central Valley Ag. Our grower members and employees live in Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas communities and share the same drinking water with our community members. We at CVA have taken an active role in understanding water quality issues related to nitrates in drinking water. We have reached out to our local Natural Resource Districts (NRDs) to offer our help and support including sponsoring the new Producer Connect App to help growers better monitor nitrogen use efficiency. We are a member of the Nebraska Water Resources Advisory Panel (WRAP) and have participated in the NRCS's Source Water Protection Water Quality sub-committee. We will continue to be active members in organizations supporting water quality. 

Central Valley Ag believes that integrating technology with good agronomic practices is a key component of responsibly managing nitrogen. For more than a decade we have used both in-house research trials and partnered with WinField United to test products promoting plant health and nutrient use efficiency. Some key products related to improving nitrogen efficiency that have come out of our trials are CVA Elite Protect Urea and CVA Elite Protect UAN. Both products are formulated to protect applied nitrogen fertilizer from loss to ammonia volatilization and to slow the conversion of ammonium to nitrate thereby protecting it from both leaching and denitrification. For growers using anhydrous ammonia, we promote the use of Centuro which also slows the conversion of ammonium to nitrate thereby protecting it from both leaching and denitrification. 

CVA's Advanced Cropping Systems (ACS) managers and Agronomy Sales teams promote the use of intensive soil sampling to understand your soil's natural ability to supply nutrients to the crop. We promote balanced soil fertility, so we don't use nitrogen as a crutch to prop up yields when other nutrients are deficient. We promote improving soil health and especially liming acid soils to help soil microbial life maximize the availability of nitrogen and other nutrients already contained in the soil. Our agronomy sales team and ACS managers can help growers build yield potential zones to optimize plant populations and nitrogen application rates specific to different areas of the field. Variable rate seeding and variable rate N can then be used to best match seeding rates to applied nitrogen and yield potential. 

We are promoting two new technologies that can help our growers maximize the efficiency of applied nitrogen fertilizers. Sentinel Fertigation is a tool that combines low and high nitrogen check blocks with weekly satellite imagery to let corn crops act as a gauge for nitrogen needs. This tool works best in irrigated fields that are set up for late-season fertigation. Adapt-N is a nitrogen modeling tool that allows us to better predict the nitrogen that will be needed for in-season nitrogen top-dress. We have been using this tool in our Innovation Research plots for more than seven years and have found that it normally allows us to reduce application rates to just 0.70 to 0.80 lbs of applied nitrogen for each bushel of corn yield when planting corn on previous soybean acres. 

For more information about CVA's nitrogen practices and recommendations, see your local CVA Field Sales Agronomist or visit the Find a Rep webpage to find your local contact. You can also visit the Agronomy webpage and under ACS, find the CVA Harvest Data books showcasing product and nitrogen rate trials.