Oops, forgot to mention what crops I'm talking about. Off the top of my head:

carrots
tomatoes
brussel sprouts
eggplant
collard greens
kohlrabi
romaine lettuce
mesclun
spinach
zucchini
green onions
radishes
red cabbage

Is this really safe to use on our crops?

Why wouldn't it be?

Nonetheless, I don't care for that analysis and the analysis isn't really one you should be applying to your crops, and that's way to much N for tomatoes and too much for my taste for the zuke, but your leafy cool seasons will appreciate it. You're better off going to a nursery and getting a better analysis & saving that fert for the annual bed.

Dan

If you were in total control of the nutrients available to your plants, there would be considerable advantage in ensuring nutrients were available in the exact ratio plants use them in, unless you were intentionally trying to manipulate nutrients to achieve targeted growth characteristics. An example of this manipulation might be using a 3:1:2 ratio fertilizer like your 24-8-16 early in the year on your tomatoes to promote top growth and get the photosynthesizing machinery in place before cutting back to something like a 2:1:2 or even a 1:1:1 ratio after the plant is well-established. Simply reducing the available N reduces the amount of vegetative growth, but since reducing N does little to slow photosynthesis, the plant still has all that photosynthate that's NOT going into vegetative growth to channel into bloom and fruit production.

You don't mention where you live, so it's difficult to know how far along your plants are, but I don't think the 24-8-16 can be too far off the mark when you're using a 'shotgun coverage' approach. It comes the closest to supplying nutrients in the same ratio plants use them of any other common ratios I can think of.

Below is a chart of the average of how plants use nutrients. I gave Nitrogen, because it's the largest nutrient component, the value of 100. Other nutrients are listed as a weight percentage of N. To read the P level comparison: For every 100 parts of N a plant uses, it will use from 13-19 parts of P. The average is 16 parts of P for every 100 parts of N, or plants will use about 1/6 as much P as N. The ratio of nutrient usage as a function of where the plant is in its growth cycle changes very little, and various plant parts (leaves, roots, fruits, blooms) will contain roughly the same amounts of the nutrients.

N 100
P 13-19 (16) 1/6
K 45-80 (62) 3/5
S 6-9 (8) 1/12
Mg 5-15 (10) 1/10
Ca 5-15 (10) 1/10
Fe 0.7
Mn 0.4
B(oron) 0.2
Zn 0.06
Cu 0.03
Cl 0.03
Mo(lybdenum) 0.003

Al

I agree with Al's overall reply, and the question was whether the fert with that analysis was OK to use throughout the season. I reiterate and clarify both replies to say that something else is needed and that fert won't do thru the summer. That is: stop using that fert and get something else to carry you through. The toms don't need that much N etc.

Dan