Arable crops

12th Nov 2025

The risk of over-winter leaching of sulphur is dependent on your soil type and over-winter rainfall but across all soil types there are still some points to remember. If you apply sulphur in the autumn, for example, as either organic manure or a sulphur-containing fertiliser there is a high risk of the available-sulphur leaching before spring, when the crop has its highest demand.

If you opt for a spring-applied sulphur product it’s important to apply one that is plant-available. A product that needs to be applied several weeks before it becomes plant-available could delay crop growth at this critical time. Most would be applying nitrogen fertiliser as soon as you can travel, therefore you run the risk of delaying regrowth if you are required to wait for the sulphur in a separate product to become available.

Looking at a practical point, having more than one fertiliser product to apply at your first timing in the spring means a greater number of passes, equalling increases in costs in fuel, time, as well as a larger storage capacity. Each pass is estimated to cost approx. £12/ha, therefore reducing the number of them is important.

Overall, the simplest approach is to use an NS compound such as YaraBela Axan 27N + 9%SO3 (or an NPKS depending on P&K requirements). This means you’re not applying all the S in one go where it is at risk of leaching, you have the increased efficiency of N and S together, the nutrients are immediately plant-available and only one pass is required. From the last 8 years of trials on compound fertilisers, applied little and often, we see an average response to sulphur of 0.79t/ha in wheat – meaning the ROI is about 3:1 (using today’s fertiliser price and Nov wheat futures).