Calculator for determining fertilizer mixes

Fertilizer injectors are used to apply fertilizer through an irrigation system. Information is need about the desired concentration, the injection ratio and the amount of N, P, and K in the fertilizer that will be dissolved in the fertilizer tank to make up a concentration in the supply tank needed to inject fertilizer at the desired concentration, The following program will accomplish the calculation for determining how much fertilizer should be added to a tank of a given size. The output of the program gives the lb. of fertilizer to apply per unit volume of the tank. If the fertilizer is in a liquid form, the lb. of fertilizer needs to be divided by the density of the liquid fertilizer in lb./gal.. The general density of a liquid fertilizer is 10-12 lb./gal. The program is a self extracting program consisting of an exe file and the documentation file for the program given as a WordPerfect file. The desired concentration of nitrogen in the irrigation water can be determined by knowing the amount of nitrogen taken up by the crop over the growing season and dividing that number by the amount of water applied. The calculated concentration then needs to be divided by the efficiency of the irrigation system and the efficiency of the fertilizer uptake. This calculation ranges from 18ppm to 30ppm depending on the efficiency of the system. Another approach to calculate the concentration is to divided the recommended seasonal application rate of nitrogen by the seasonal amount of water applied. The recommended fertilizer application rate includes the correction for the fertilizer and irrigation efficiency. If that number is based on surface irrigation experiments then the number will be high compared to amount of fertilizer need for a drip irrigation system because the irrigation efficiency of a surface irrigation system ranges from 60 -75 % compared to 80-90 % for a drip irrigation system.