Every Q4, growers and farm managers get handed the same old industry “treats”: bold promises with nothing real behind the wrapper. This year we wanted to hand out something different. Real numbers from an independent, multi-year university study on a fertigation approach that researchers have been mentioning for years.
Researchers from UC Davis, with funding from the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s (CDFA) Fertilizer Research and Education Program (FREP), spent over a decade studying a 143-acre almond orchard near Modesto, California. They compared five years of conventional fertilizer practices against a shift to high-frequency, low-concentration (HFLC) in following years.
Two things are worth saying up front: 1) This is independent, third-party research. It wasn’t commissioned, sponsored, or funded by Deerpoint. The grower in the study isn’t a Deerpoint Group customer (yet). 2) The orchard wasn’t running the DPG White Box™. The study tested the approach of continuously feeding nitrogen in frequent, small doses instead of large slug applications. We call it Feed the Curve™, researchers call it HFLC.
What the Researchers Found
- Nitrogen use efficiency climbed from 74% to 92% as the orchard transitioned from grower standard to HFLC over a few years.
- Nitrogen applied dropped 17.5%-30%, while yield continued to rise about 15%.
- Nitrogen input cost savings on this 143-acre orchard were $3,100-$5,000 per year with high-frequency, low-concentration continuous fertigation.
Where the DPG White Box™ Comes In
We ran our own numbers on what that 15% yield gain would have been worth at the almond prices of the time the research was done. On this orchard, the extra yield alone works out to roughly $256,000-$383,000 in additional crop revenue. That’s on top of the savings of nitrogen alone, not to mention other important nutrients that could’ve benefited from HFLC applications.
To be clear: this is not us patting ourselves on the back for a study we ran. We had no part in it. What this research does is validate the principle that Feed the Curve™ continuous fertigation was built around: trees take up nitrogen on a curve, not a calendar. And feeding them that way measurably helps the farm’s bottom line.
The idea of spoon-feeding a crop with HFLC applications is nothing new in the research world. The hard part has always been execution. Frequent, small, precisely timed fertigation events are easy to describe and hard to execute.
That’s what continuous fertigation delivered through the DPG White Box™ automates. Two things growers tend to ask about:
- What does it cost me out of pocket? Nothing for the box itself. It’s part of a crop nutrition program with Deerpoint, remotely managed by our field team, but overseen by yours.
- Do I lose control of my own nutrition program? No. We do tissue and soil sampling and make recommendations, you approve what goes out. The White Box and our team handle the precise, consistent delivery of it, with full visibility into what’s happening through your Grower Portal, so the work gets done without you giving up the decisions.
Get the Full Picture
No tricks. Just a treat of a system that does the work research shows pays off.
Would you like to take a look at our 15-slide breakdown of the FREP study? Answer a couple of questions below and you can download it.
Otherwise, you’re welcome to take a look at and digest the full 40+ page paper on your own here:Â https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/is/ffldrs/frep/pdfs/19-0968_Harter_2001-2412_FRrevJH.pdfÂ