This is a follow-up to the original training on identifying plant available water.  To find the first and more basic approach please click HERE.

For a more advanced approach to identifying plant available water, it is best to pull core samples out of each foot and have a textural analysis done.  

In this example we will look at a field where we did just that and used EC data as the guide to determine where to sample.  In this image we are showing you by number the lightest to heaviest soil textures in this field.  Using the same textural triangle that we used in the previous article (you can access it HERE) we were able to find out exactly what the percent of sand and clay were.  This helped tremendously in determining probe placement, VRI adjustments, etc.

You will also see in this image that the soils map doesn’t match the EC map very precisely.  That is not surprising and thus the reason to fully mange field variability it is important to stay focused on the fixed variables to really fix field issues.