Use the form that 'real' farmers use. Your cost will then be zero! The lawn/garden test requires a payment. Last I knew the minimum was $10.
They ask you to name the crop so they can offer a fertilizer recommendation. I don't remember. Is there a option for food plots? With all respect to my Virginia Tech brothers and sisters their recommendation doesn't mean much. I guess it's a good guide if you don't know what else to do, but there are so many options. Bring your results back here and let's explore together. By the way, food plots are listed as a no charge situation right along with all the other ag production samples.
I completely concur. Fertilizer recommendations are all over the map. I've taken soil test results to different farming experts, told them what I was planting, and asked for a fertilizer recommendation and gotten very different recommendations. And all of these recommendations were for farming, not food plotting because I only gave them a single monoculture crop and said nothing about deer, wildlife, or food plotting.
If you look at VT's commercial form carefully, they ask for your soil type (percent by field), when you previously applied lime, what crop you previously grew, and what yield you previously got with your crop. These can all play a role in the recommendation. These recommendations are all focused on maximizing yield per acre where the value of the increased yield exceeds the cost of producing it.
Yield is not the best objective for food plotting for deer. If you are feeding deer in a QDM sense you are working at scale with significant acreage and food plots are targeted toward stress periods when nature's quality food becomes unavailable. They supplement natural food sources and should not be intended to replace them. They are a small percentage of a deer's over all diet. Deer are browsers in general, not grazers. Farmers typically plant monocultures to make harvesting cops easy for mechanical equipment and when they harvest, they remove a significant amount of nutrients from the soil. They are forced to use rotation and high inputs, especially with traditional tillage. No-till farms with cover crops are a step closer but efficient yield is still the driver. With food plotting, we have a lot more flexibility. Deer don't need high yield for attraction either. In fact, I find bucks tend to use my weedier fields more frequently than my clean clover fields. Does seem to use both pretty equally. Because we don't harvest removing nutrients, we can plant mixes of complementary crops and take advantage of natural nutrient cycling as long as we focus on soil health rather than yield. We can manage for deer or make a small property more huntable at a fraction of the cost.
More important for food plotters than fertilizer amounts is getting the pH adjusted with lime and not abusing the soil with tillage. Google "Ray the soil guy" and watch some of his videos to get a handle on soil health. Start with the short infiltration video. Most are focused at no-till farmers with expensive equipment, but the underlying soil health concepts are the same. They take long read through Crimson-n-Camo's Throw n Mow thread. He takes these concepts and shows how folks with minimal equipment can apply them. In VA lime is generally the best way to adjust pH. You'll see a lot about Gypsum on this forum. It is good info but in general, it does not make our soils more friable as it does in some soils according to VT. VT will not only tell you how much lime, but how to apply it. My soils require about 4 tons per acre to initially adjust the pH to neutral, but you can't apply it all at once. They say to apply no more than 3 tons/ac in a single application and then wait 6 months to apply the rest. The good news is that lime moves slowly through my soils and it takes quite a few years before I need to apply another ton/acre of maintenance lime after the initial top dressing.
The soil tests at VT are free for commercial farming for the basic test. The do charge a few dollars for an OM test. I would probably do that. If you focus on soil health, you'll find that OM is a key component in improving nutrient cycling. It takes years to build and knowing what you have will provide a baseline so that you can tell how you are dong with your soils in 5 or 10 years.
Thanks,
Jack
