Skip to content

Soil test calculator

Adjust your dose to your soil test.

Enter your soil-test results — available P and K, organic carbon and pH — and a verified crop dose is adjusted up or down: build up low nutrients, maintain medium ones, draw down high ones.

Crops marked Under Review use data that is still being verified. Choose "Custom base dose" to enter your own NPK.

From your soil health card or lab report. Leave blank any value you don't have — that nutrient keeps its base dose.

Soil labs rarely report a nitrogen class, so organic carbon is used as the proxy for your soil's nitrogen-supplying capacity.

Your adjusted dose will appear here

Pick a crop, enter your soil-test values, and hit calculate. Every adjustment step is shown.

Method

The method, in plain words

Build-up, maintenance, drawdown — the same logic soil labs use on health cards.

A blanket recommendation assumes an average soil. A soil test tells you what your field already holds: if phosphorus tests high, you can cut the P dose and save money; if it tests low, you raise it to build the soil up. This tool starts from a verified crop recommendation and applies exactly that logic — +30% for low-rated nutrients, base for medium, −25% for high.
Available phosphorus (Olsen method, mg/kg or ppm), available potassium (ammonium acetate method, kg/ha or ppm), organic carbon (%), and pH — the four values on a standard soil health card. You can enter P and K in either unit; the tool converts with the standard furrow-slice factor (×2.24).
Routine soil labs rarely report a mineral-nitrogen class, so extension systems use organic carbon as the proxy for native nitrogen-supplying capacity: more organic carbon means more nitrogen will mineralize during the season. It is a well-established proxy, but it is not a measured N value — the result is labeled as such.
No — pH never changes the calculated dose here. Above pH 7.5, phosphorus increasingly precipitates as calcium and magnesium phosphates (P fixation), so placement matters: band the full phosphorus dose near the seed at sowing instead of broadcasting. The tool flags this as a note, not a dose change.
The custom base option is generic guidance only — a starting point for crops with no verified recommendation in our database. If a verified crop×region dose exists, always use that instead; verified figures carry their published source.