As you begin planning for next season, you may need to make important decisions about next year’s fertilizer applications. How do you determine next year’s plan? Do you duplicate what you did this year or seek advice from trusted sources?
 
At WinField, we believe in making fact-based decisions. We allow data to drive our recommendations in order to help you get the best performance and healthiest plants. For many years, WinField has offered soil, saturated paste, tissue and water testing to provide insights that can help plan fertilizer applications. This year WinField introduced resin testing, a new testing method  to help further refine nutrient recommendations.
 
What is resin testing?
Resin testing uses positive- and negative-charged gel beads that react with the soil solution and absorb nutrients. The gel beads are charged to mimic plant roots and therefore, the nutrients absorbed by the resins are similar to what the plant would absorb. Resin testing gives an accurate picture of the nutrients in the soil that are available to the plant. Resin tests differ from saturated paste extracts in that saturated paste extracts show all available nutrients. Resin tests only show the nutrients that a plant can uptake.


 
Readable Results
Following is an example of soil and resin test results from the same site. You can see the soil test on this site detects main deficient and responsive nutrients that according to the resin test are adequately available to the plant. Therefore, this client is able to save fertilizer application expense and produce healthy turf.



Notice the layout of these tests? WinField has invested significant time to improve the presentation of the test results. An easy-to-read bar graph with green, yellow and red lets you know which nutrients are needed and which ones are adequately available.