Customer Reviews

Neal Kinsey's Hands-On Agronomy

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At a guess the reviewer "A reader from New York" has never had anything to do with soils and farming. He/she just eats the end products.
I am a farmer in Australia dealing with some of the hardest yet some of the most potentially productive soils as any in the USA. This book was recommended to me by a fellow farmer. After reading it I was stunned as to how much sense it made. I can now relate soil test data to what I see in the field and understand why some areas always produce more than others. It's not "quackery" when you can understand how mother nature and basic chemistry allow some areas of a field to outperform others by sometimes 3-1.
Readers of this book should be farmers who are willing to take a close look at their soils, work the numbers, think about it and then be prepared to accept what they WILL see in it all.
I am by no means an organic farmer, I still use some commercial fertilizers and spray about as much as anyone. After reading this book I have started working on balancing the soil because I see from experience the most balanced soils producing the best crops.
I don't really care if Neal Kinsey has a consulting practice on soils. And as far as the book being a bit "light on" for detail is concerned, well it's not. It is a great first step to understanding the soil we grow things in. Fertilizer brouchures are light on for detail.
Happy reading and I hope the little light bulb gets turned on in your head like it did in mine.

This book seems ideally suited for the land grant university student or farmer with a biology or chemistry degree perusing a livelihood in large scale or industrial agriculture. I am a small farmer without a degree but a very solid understanding of bio and chem and I found this book to be a bit daunting. The book starts out with a series of case studies in which the author always emerges as the hero. After the advertisements for his service and all the high-horsemanship you begin to smell the meat and potatoes. What follows is a complicated mess of NPK, pounds per acre and yield. Small attempts are made at including holistic management techniques but they are weakly explained and sparse. This book is advertised to farmers but the chem and bio concepts are difficult and without prior knowledge you will need to do significant outside the book research to follow along. If you are a medium to large scale farmer growing conventional commodity crops, and have prior knowledge to or a significant interest in learning these tough concepts this book may be useful. I would not recommend this book to Multi-croppers, pasture based, organic or small farmers in general. This book made me question the role of leading agronomists in a future SUSTAINABLE food production system.