So…  you have an excellent soybean stand, plenty of moisture, good weed control. That’s a strong foundation for foliar feeding which could add several bushels of beans, given the right nutrients and the right timing.

We encourage tissue testing or sap testing to hone in on any nutrient which could become your crop’s limiting factor in reaching maximum yield potential.

But even without testing, a broad spectrum nutrient blend, including the micronutrients, has good odds of doubling or tripling your money spent on nutrient products. If you have your own high-clearance sprayer, adding foliars through the season can help that great machine earn its keep.

What we’ve found in testing foliar nutrients since 2008 is this:  If a foliar enhances soybean yields when applied by itself, then including WakeUP Summer in the tank mix will bump the yield response even more.  Here’s why:

1. WakeUP Summer improves leaf contact by reducing surface tension of the spray mix. Spray does not bead up on the soybean’s fuzzy surface, it sinks into the leaf.

2. WakeUP Summer softens and lifts the waxy leaf cuticle, opening the way for nutrient absorption.

3. WakeUP Summer mobilizes nutrient metabolism inside the soybean. Unlike most surfactants made with petroleum products, WakeUP Summer is formulated entirely from plant-derived oils, alcohols and sugars. It continues to reduce the surface tension of plant sap internally, helping speed sugars and other photosynthetic nutrients to growing points. 

Click on this link to download and read our Portable Document File summary of our studies, conducted on soybeans over several years in cooperation with Bruce Voss, a retired Iowa State University soybean field research specialist. Bruce and his son conduct yield trials across Iowa for soybean seed growers. 

We’re not in the business of marketing micronutrients. You’ll recognize several of the brand names we tested. The most responsive one we tested was an experimental blend of kelp “tea” plus humates plus micronutrients put together by Erik Carlson, who runs the formulation and manufacture of WakeUP. Although it’s not a marketed product, the message we took from that test was that humates have a definite influence in “leveraging” other nutrients already available to a good crop.