Don’t need potash or is this guy wrong

I didn't watch the video, but the Hefty comment sucked me in...ha ha

Brian Hefty personally looked at a soil test of mine and told me I needed to put on like 800# of potash to "balance my ratios". I did it and ever since I've been keeping track of it and no difference on any crop, not even a visual one. I'm a big believer in fertilizer and I shot a few hundred pounds of K on when it was dirt cheap, but I won't bother with it in the seedrow or if it's expensive. 

Do your own trial, your results may differ.

I was talking to a guy from Wawanesa at Ag days and he said he doesn't use potash and he gets the same yields as his neighbor across the road that does use it. Up until recently they said we didn't need it either, but now it is recommended.
I think there will be some test strips this year here just to see if there really is a difference, but I am predicting that I will not go crazy with inputs if things don't look more promising this spring.

I was hoping you would chime in . I remember you mentioning that high rate application. This guy in the video basically says you can keep soil testing the same gram of soil over and over on the hour ever hour for days and keep coming up with the same number. Says it’s impossible to get a potash soil test that is worth while. He has numerous long term trials that basically show no depletion.
I’ve used very little yet my tissue tests are always on the high side. Most weeds like high potassium

Cloride will get in the plant before N. make your N application less effective ?

Agree with Meskie, I beleive it is the CL in KCl that is helping more so than the K. I have added potash to my blends and thought it helped the barley stand better. And I have then to figure out my soil tests that say I have anywhere from 145 to 340 ppm of potassium already are now needing more potassium to help the crop stand. Somewhere in that scenario there is a reason to think about things.

My soil tests all the time come back with sulfur tests off the chart, +120 lbs in 6", +360 lbs in 6 to 24" and yet get the accepted science that adding sulfur helps the plants because that other sulfur isn't as available. I am not convinced it isn't available and that video Shmiffy put up does make an interesting point. I also like the point the speaker said about not allowing his research to be published for many years.

Aside from all that, I am leaning more towards trying to use more of the right nutrients instead of just more. And a discussion around potash seems to fit with that thinking, or at least that is where my thinking has led me. Have an agronomist that is steering me that way also so not just me thinking this way but also a local guy who is seeing a large sampling of results.

I think Mulders chart has a lot of value for understanding the bigger picture. Need to balance the nutrients more so than hammer certain ones on. And that is why I think it is the chloride that is doing the work vs the potassium when adding potash.

I haven't done tissue sampling yet but been thinking more this winter that I need to do that. Because my agronomist cut my recommended fertilizer rates back even more this go around. I could up my yield goal I suppose and that would fix that concern of too low of recommendation, however if I have some mineral antagonism to deal with then that sort of limits my max potential anyway so seems to me I need some tissue tests to get to the heart of the matter. More fertilizer doesn't seem to be the answer.

I suspect the problem with 800lbs/ac is the added CL may have gained a response, the massive amount of K could very well of tied up other minerals and therefore negates the overall benefit. This is where my thinking goes these days. A plant can only take in so much of a certain element to grow regardless of how much of that mineral is easily available, the plant needs all the other minerals in equal relation as well as environmental factors (temp, water, sunlight) to make use of that one mineral that is in abundance.

What I don't think is being accounted for is that even minerals not "readily available" are still present in the soil. The assumption is a plant root system can't access them. Seems to me that is what the research being printed is now showing - that the roots do create a tiny ecosystem at their tips and are more actively converting soil compounds into available minerals when conditions are right. When we apply heavy amount of synthetic fertilizers the plant doesn't need to work as aggressively to make these needed minerals available. But the plant can do more then we are told it can. Regenerative farming seems to be focussed on this idea on how to make the roots doing soil conversion work better. The idea of spruce trees growing out of rocks in the Canadian shield is a good example to visualize this.

I think the whole idea of a big application was to balance ratios of K-Mg and make nutrients more available. This was several years back and I haven't given it much thought since, so I might have misrepresented that a bit. The Hefty brothers used to harp on this topic lots.