Hi, I’m Trent Roberts, assistant professor with the University of Arkansas
Division of Agriculture. [Trent Roberts, Research Assistant Professor,
University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture stands in a lab with soil
sampling equipment.]
Today I would like to demonstrate to you how to take an 18 inch soil sample
for the N-STAR® or the Nitrogen Soil Test specifically for silt loam soils.
[N-STAR® Soil Test for Rice]
Before you go out to the field, the one thing that you need to do is ensuring
that you have some type of mark that tells us exactly when we’ve sampled 18
inches deep. When you get to the field, go ahead and test it out and have a tape
measure that you can stick down in that arguer hole to determine from the soil
surface how deep you have actually sampled. [Trent holds a drill with an arguer
attached. Inset video shows a person in a field showing the arguer attached to a
drill with tape to determine the correct depth. Trent shows a tape measure
locked in at 18 inches.]
You want that to be as close to 18 inches for silt loam soils as you can get.
You want to take your clean bucket and push it into the soil to ensure that the
nipple on the bottom of the plate is pushed down and the plate is flat with the
soil surface. [Video shows a person placing a bucket in a field and drilling
with an arguer to collect the soil sample.]
Simply insert the arguer into the pipe in the center of the bucket, and you
want to go ahead and start taking soil samples slowly. The soil will fall into
the bottom of the bucket. Once you get all the way down and your bushing stop
or your mark gets to the top of the pipe on the inside of the bucket, you know
that you’ve gone deep enough and you just want to clean out the remaining soil
in the center of the pipe.
From that step, you want to have your sample bags ready with the field ID and
the producer name on them. You simply want to take the soil that is in the
bucket and pour all of the soil in the bottom of the bucket into the bag. [Video
shows Mike Hamilton, County Extension Agent, Poinsett, University of Arkansas
Division of Agriculture placing soil samples into a zip bag. Slide shows a zip
bag of soil. Label samples with your name, field name, and sample number.]
The majority of your samples will easily fit into a 1-quart Ziploc® bag. You
always want to include the producer name, the field name and then the sample ID
number.
What we want to do is to just kind of fold this over and make it as tight as
possible for shipment. The more compact they are the less likely they are to
move around. [Video shows Trent and Mike Hamilton tightly folding over the zip
bag.]
The next thing is we recommend ten samples per field and what we would like
you to do is get something like a 2-gallon Ziploc® or similar sealable bag and
put all of the ten samples from a single field, package them together in this
2-gallon bag, make sure and fold it over, seal it nice and tight. The more
compact these are when you place them in your box for shipment, the less likely
they are to slip and slide around. [Video shows Trent Roberts placing the ten
small zip bags holding samples into a large 2-gallon zip bag]
Once you have all your samples like this, you simply want to put them down
into your box, get some more packing material and fill in around your soil
sample to ensure that you’ve got a nice tight fit. [Video shows Trent Roberts
placing the 2-gallon zip bag into a box and adds packing to keep the samples
from sliding around in the box.]
You can see here that by adding this packing material, we prevent any
slippage of the soil samples.
Busted bags will result in spilled soil samples. And a spilled soil sample is
invalid and we will not be able to even analyze it here in the soil test lab at
the risk that it might prove to give us a bad recommendation.
Packaging your soil samples prior to shipment is a very important part of
getting a good, sound nitrogen fertilizer recommendation using N-STAR®. [For
more information on N-STAR® sampling methods visit
www.uaex.edu.]
[Music plays, U of A University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture Research
and Extension, University of Arkansas System]
University of Arkansas • Division of Agriculture
Cooperative Extension Service
2301 South University Avenue
Little Rock, Arkansas 72204 • USA
Phone (501) 671-2000 • Fax (501) 671-2209
