Stumpf Farm - Spring Wheat Trials

University of Nebraska – Lincoln Author

08/31/2020 Added

16 Plays

Description

Strahinja Stepanovic discusses preliminary results on spring wheat variety trials and impact of nitrogen fertilizer rate on yield and protein.
Feedback form

Searchable Transcript

Search:

[00:00:06.960]Hello, this is Strahinja Stepanovic
[00:00:09.410]and I'm UNL graduate student.
[00:00:11.990]Today I'll be talking about spring wheat production
[00:00:14.150]in Western Nebraska.
[00:00:16.040]To get you started, I just wanna talk about the most common
[00:00:20.170]crop rotation in Western Nebraska for drawling agriculture.
[00:00:24.360]And most of the guys in the past 20, 30 years
[00:00:26.840]have done wheat-corn-fallow but over the years
[00:00:31.610]that fallow component of that crop predation
[00:00:34.730]has become more expensive just because we have to use
[00:00:37.940]more herbicides and weeds got tougher to control
[00:00:40.770]so we're spending anywhere between 40 and a 100 dollars
[00:00:43.450]every year on fallow.
[00:00:44.710]And especially if you're renting the cash rent has gone up
[00:00:49.420]since 30 years ago.
[00:00:51.490]And then we think corn prices also in that crop rotation
[00:00:55.770]have gone down to a point where in the past couple of years
[00:01:00.650]we hit some record low weak prices
[00:01:03.130]and corn prices have been three to four dollars.
[00:01:07.420]So on top of that, we had issues with wheat grain protein
[00:01:11.300]so that old rotation has becoming less attractive
[00:01:15.840]and more guys are interested in doing
[00:01:18.840]continuous crop rotation.
[00:01:20.120]So in a continuous crop rotation,
[00:01:22.520]there's basically two groups of farmers.
[00:01:24.655]One of them is trying to do wheat that likes to keep
[00:01:28.790]that wheat because of that residue
[00:01:31.470]they're trying to do wheat-corn alternative crop
[00:01:34.410]with alternative crop being field peas or chickpeas
[00:01:37.150]or proso millet and even dry land soybeans or milo.
[00:01:42.050]And there's still a good number of guys
[00:01:44.030]that are keeping that three year rotation
[00:01:45.700]but a lot of them are going to continue to scorn.
[00:01:49.430]And I have year on the survey about 15% of the guys
[00:01:52.860]but that probably went up to about 20 to 25 last year.
[00:01:56.710]And it's probably going to continue to increase
[00:01:59.030]with struggles on a weak market.
[00:02:01.640]So this is where actually in this continuous crop rotation
[00:02:07.460]is where farmers believe spring wheat has a potential
[00:02:10.600]as a rotational crop as a crop
[00:02:12.330]as a crop that's gonna break the weed and pest cycles.
[00:02:15.760]About three third or fourth year into that rotation
[00:02:18.750]farmers start typically to see a reduction in yield
[00:02:24.520]and they don't see as much residue on the ground
[00:02:26.730]so they know wheat can provide that residue
[00:02:28.810]and spring wheat kind of gave him my idea to go in there
[00:02:31.570]with that and hopefully harvested with stripper header,
[00:02:34.790]build up their residue,
[00:02:36.140]and then going to the continuous corn cycle again.
[00:02:39.840]So one interesting thing about spring wheat
[00:02:42.890]that UNL actually looked at spring wheat about 30 years ago
[00:02:49.430]and did about five years of spring wheat variety
[00:02:52.950]of elevation in Nebraska
[00:02:55.350]and it turns out then in Eastern Nebraska,
[00:02:57.820]and this is 30 years ago guys so,
[00:03:00.040]in Eastern Nebraska spring wheat yielded at about 37%
[00:03:05.070]of winter wheat and in Nebraska Panhandle,
[00:03:08.270]spring wheat yielded admirable 74% of winter wheat.
[00:03:12.960]probably just higher elevation, cooler temperatures,
[00:03:16.170]shorter season cooler temperatures than in Eastern Nebraska,
[00:03:19.660]kind of made him more favorable environment
[00:03:21.610]for spring wheat.
[00:03:24.160]And you must be asking yourself with that 70%
[00:03:28.470]yield of winter wheat,
[00:03:29.510]why did we not adopt spring wheat 30 years ago?
[00:03:34.570]Well, there's a lot of spring.
[00:03:36.340]First of all, spring wheat is a totally different crop
[00:03:39.780]from winter wheat it has a different futures
[00:03:42.870]and we don't have an infrastructure
[00:03:44.350]we don't have readily available crop insurance,
[00:03:47.110]marketing opportunities, availability of seed,
[00:03:50.380]every little storage has to be separate from winter wheat.
[00:03:52.880]So we did not have that 30 years ago
[00:03:55.460]we don't have it right now
[00:03:57.880]unless you have your own storage and your own marketing
[00:04:00.740]that you do yourself.
[00:04:02.580]But also that wheat-corn-fallow rotation works pretty well
[00:04:06.430]for a lot of guys back in the days.
[00:04:08.510]Corn prices were better, wheat prices were better
[00:04:10.630]there was not as many herbicide resistant weeds
[00:04:12.960]so fallow was very efficient.
[00:04:15.200]So they just kinda abandoned it
[00:04:17.490]it didn't have a as much value.
[00:04:20.360]And what has changed today is actually that corn
[00:04:24.070]and wheat price went down and fallow is more less effective.
[00:04:28.270]Like I said, gastrin went up and taxes are expensive
[00:04:31.820]so more guys want to do continuous cropping.
[00:04:34.954]So with the financial opportunity changing
[00:04:38.360]in favor of spring wheat, you know,
[00:04:41.900]maybe it's time to revisit that and see if those yield
[00:04:44.950]differences between winter wheat still stand.
[00:04:47.950]So we wanted to kick off this research this year
[00:04:52.860]at Henry J.Stumpf International Wheat Center near Grant.
[00:04:57.330]Our objective was to look at the look at the number of
[00:05:02.200]spring wheat varieties
[00:05:03.430]basically anything that we can get a hold on
[00:05:06.010]because there's no breeding programs in central
[00:05:08.480]and Southern Plains for spring wheat.
[00:05:10.000]Most of those rallies came from the North,
[00:05:13.520]and we also wanted to get some baseline information
[00:05:16.060]on management.
[00:05:16.950]The two things that kind of popped out was tillage
[00:05:20.680]and nitrogen rates.
[00:05:24.140]So this is how the demo plot looked like at Grant this year
[00:05:30.390]here's the layout.
[00:05:32.170]So first of all, we had different tillage blocks
[00:05:36.010]here's a no-till block
[00:05:37.770]and then next to it was vertical till.
[00:05:39.950]and then conventional till.
[00:05:41.150]Conventional till is a little bit more aggressive type
[00:05:44.190]of tillage that incorporates most of the residue
[00:05:46.800]whereas no-till kind of chops up the residue districts
[00:05:49.760]to ground a little bit.
[00:05:52.040]Farmers believed that tillage helps us break down
[00:05:55.730]that residue and warms up the soil a little bit better,
[00:05:58.110]it's easier to plant and it has a better stand.
[00:06:00.830]We have seen some of the spring tea producers
[00:06:03.670]do that in our area.
[00:06:05.270]So we had those three tillage blocks then three days after
[00:06:09.990]the tillage was performed we planted 19 different varieties
[00:06:14.950]in each tillage block.
[00:06:17.380]So and then a month after that,
[00:06:19.840]we came in with the sprayer across all those varieties
[00:06:22.720]and tillage blocks and applied five different nitrogen rates
[00:06:27.225]ranging from zero to 200 pounds of nitrogen.
[00:06:31.140]One important thing to mention is that previous crop
[00:06:33.460]was actually corn and we had 120 bushel yield on this
[00:06:40.430]field for dry land corn.
[00:06:43.040]And there was about 19 pounds of nitrogen
[00:06:47.460]in the top two feet of soil to start this crop.
[00:06:51.100]We planted spring wheat very early
[00:06:55.010]we're talking about early March.
[00:06:56.940]A lot of years we can't get into the field early March
[00:06:59.620]because it's still frozen.
[00:07:01.900]As a matter of fact, there were still a lot of parts
[00:07:03.890]of the field frozen at that time on this farm
[00:07:06.840]but this was kind of a senior soil
[00:07:08.630]so it worked out well for us.
[00:07:10.820]The seeding grade that we use
[00:07:12.600]that was recommended to us was actually 1.3 million seeds
[00:07:17.610]per acre but we up that one to 1.5 million live seeds
[00:07:21.640]and we then adjusted that to 90% germination.
[00:07:25.780]So we probably had a 1.7 around 1.7 million seeds out there.
[00:07:30.860]We just didn't want it to seeding for seeding rate
[00:07:34.310]to be a limiting factor
[00:07:35.780]and just looking at how the plants got up
[00:07:40.390]and going there was not as many tillers
[00:07:43.790]that we thought it would be.
[00:07:45.010]So seeding grade would be a very interesting study
[00:07:47.990]I think even 2000 seeds, 2 million seeds
[00:07:53.540]might be even better than will be planted here.
[00:07:56.900]So we just didn't want that to be a factor.
[00:08:01.200]We like many of the guys in Western Nebraska,
[00:08:03.970]we hit pretty dry and hot year for spring wheat
[00:08:09.500]and as a cool season crop especially in June out there
[00:08:14.060]we had two inches of water less than what we get on average.
[00:08:21.300]And a lot of guys didn't even get a drop of rain
[00:08:24.380]during that time in our area
[00:08:25.950]but on top of that we had a lot of 100 degree days
[00:08:29.880]and just a hot blowing wind all the time.
[00:08:33.130]And this is during the critical period of flowering
[00:08:35.680]and grain filling for spring wheat.
[00:08:37.380]So it wasn't really a great year
[00:08:39.520]for any spring planted crop.
[00:08:44.300]So going back to looking at the varieties
[00:08:46.880]and what they yielded our plot average
[00:08:48.610]was 16.8 bushels per acre, which given a year,
[00:08:52.650]we were pretty pleased with .
[00:08:54.870]Averaging across all nitrogen treatments and tillage blocks,
[00:08:57.810]the best variety was WestBred 9590
[00:09:01.380]that yielded 20.2 bushels per acre
[00:09:04.700]which was 42% of winter wheat yield that we got
[00:09:08.498]in a field just close by.
[00:09:11.490]What was really interesting also is that we contacted
[00:09:15.260]six breeding programs from the North
[00:09:19.130]and five of them actually had at least one variety
[00:09:23.460]in a upper half of yield rankings whereas North Dakota,
[00:09:28.030]all five varieties from North Dakota
[00:09:31.180]actually were in a bottom half of yield ratings.
[00:09:34.110]So I wouldn't throw any one of these away just yet
[00:09:38.120]because marketing is going to be such a big component
[00:09:41.140]of this study.
[00:09:42.210]We gonna try to look at the grain protein as well as
[00:09:45.620]baking and milling qualities for these varieties.
[00:09:50.530]So for example, if you have a good yielding variety
[00:09:52.950]but the millers don't want it
[00:09:55.730]and they don't have enough protein
[00:09:57.990]or enough desirable baking and milling qualities,
[00:10:01.830]you gonna have a hard time selling that variety.
[00:10:03.810]So we gonna do some kind of post-harvest analysis
[00:10:07.820]on grain to inform you guys on that as well.
[00:10:12.440]In terms of spring wheat response to nitrogen,
[00:10:15.330]what I found most interesting is that
[00:10:20.140]we had six bushel yield at zero applied nitrogen
[00:10:22.900]which is pretty poor
[00:10:24.370]but with 50 pounds of nitrogen applied,
[00:10:29.400]we got to 10 bushel yield bump.
[00:10:32.310]And then for additional 150 pounds of nitrogen,
[00:10:36.000]we only got six or seven bushel yield bump.
[00:10:39.040]So three times as much, three times,
[00:10:41.200]four times as much nitrogen and about half his yield gain
[00:10:45.110]that was really interesting.
[00:10:46.290]So if you look at the,
[00:10:47.740]we talk about how many pounds of nitrogen to make a bushel
[00:10:50.860]of grain for winter wheat.
[00:10:52.640]And for spring wheat, when we applied 50 pounds of nitrogen,
[00:10:55.960]it actually took 3.5 pounds of nitrogen to make a bushel.
[00:11:00.470]And at the high nitrogen rate
[00:11:02.000]it actually took 8.6 pounds of nitrogen to make a bushel.
[00:11:06.610]Another interesting thing, you can see that
[00:11:10.330]that in that nitrogen response, when it starts to plateau,
[00:11:14.480]and we start adding that nitrogen,
[00:11:16.200]it will be interesting after we do the protein analysis
[00:11:20.100]to just see how much the grain protein will change
[00:11:22.710]with that higher rate of nitrogen.
[00:11:27.230]So compared that to winter wheat,
[00:11:29.760]winter wheat we'll make a bushel with about two
[00:11:32.720]it needs about two pounds of nitrogen to make a bushel.
[00:11:35.090]So we gonna be fertilizing more per bushel on spring wheat
[00:11:38.710]than we do on winter wheat, that's the bottom line.
[00:11:41.800]Another things that I want to mention is that
[00:11:44.150]on the lower nitrogen grades,
[00:11:46.280]the tillage treatments actually perform better
[00:11:49.400]possibly because chopping down that residue, breaking down
[00:11:52.760]residue, facilitating the mineralization of organic matter
[00:11:56.730]we had some nitrogen release.
[00:11:58.820]So tillage treatments actually yield a better
[00:12:00.760]and low nitrogen rate whereas on a high nitrogen rate,
[00:12:05.020]no till yielded about seven and up to 10 bushel yield
[00:12:10.190]advantage over tillage treatments.
[00:12:12.100]So if you don't touch that rate in a year,
[00:12:14.130]we had so dry and so hot that extra residue on the ground
[00:12:19.810]help reduce the evaporation, have more water available
[00:12:23.270]for the crop and then increase the yield potential.
[00:12:26.440]And when you increase the yield potential,
[00:12:28.090]that's where the benefits from additional nitrogen
[00:12:30.630]come from.
[00:12:33.210]So when we talk about the optimal nitrogen rate
[00:12:36.380]this year the optimal nitrogen rate for spring wheat
[00:12:39.020]was 51 pounds of nitrogen per acre
[00:12:41.890]but that will highly depend on a number of factors.
[00:12:45.610]First of all, being yield response to nitrogen rates.
[00:12:48.230]So if we had a year with more rain
[00:12:51.920]and a little bit cooler year,
[00:12:55.070]the yield potential will probably increase
[00:12:57.100]and we would have probably had better response to nitrogen,
[00:13:00.230]but that didn't happen, we had dry and hot and dry year
[00:13:03.030]So if we had a better year that that optimal nitrogen rate
[00:13:08.980]would probably go up and the point of diminishing returns
[00:13:12.150]would probably move into a higher nitrogen rate.
[00:13:16.250]The economically optimal nitrogen rate also depends on
[00:13:19.920]fertilizer, price and grain market price
[00:13:22.150]that you get for your wheat.
[00:13:23.900]So if you think about it if you are able to find nitrogen
[00:13:29.200]if you are paying nitrogen or example, in this year
[00:13:32.280]if you pay for an,
[00:13:35.328]if your nitrogen fertilizer was about zero 40 cents a pound
[00:13:40.160]and you were able to sell your spring wheat
[00:13:42.070]for six dollars not five,
[00:13:44.450]your optimal nitrogen rate would have been
[00:13:47.140]78 pounds of nitrogen.
[00:13:49.090]So that optimal nitrogen rate really depends
[00:13:51.970]on a lot of factors
[00:13:52.860]It's actually a really a moving target.
[00:13:55.740]So a lot of guys ask me,
[00:13:58.510]I don't wanna shoot for 20 bushel yield
[00:14:00.460]and apply 20 pounds of nitrogen
[00:14:02.410]so I want to shoot for that 40 bushel a year
[00:14:04.890]and if I get the home run, I get paid.
[00:14:07.440]So I wanna fertilizer 40 bushel yield and high protein
[00:14:11.490]So if I throw in more nitrogen and I don't get that yield,
[00:14:16.700]well, some of that nitrogen that I over apply
[00:14:18.960]be available to the next year's crop either through the
[00:14:21.520]residue or rest in the soil.
[00:14:24.800]So that was an interesting question.
[00:14:26.120]So after about a month after we harvest that spring wheat,
[00:14:29.930]when I went out there to sample,
[00:14:34.160]took some residue samples and soil samples,
[00:14:36.640]analyze them for nitrogen content
[00:14:38.900]and figure it out that
[00:14:41.200]compared to control, 200 pounds of nitrogen rate
[00:14:46.080]hit about 10 pounds of nitrogen and more in residue
[00:14:49.540]and 100 pounds more in the soil.
[00:14:52.400]So that means if you apply two kinds of pounds of nitrogen
[00:14:55.410]this year, you know, crop probably left 100 pounds behind
[00:15:02.460]So the crop only may be used a 100.
[00:15:05.330]So is that going to be available for next year's crop?
[00:15:08.260]That's a very interesting question.
[00:15:09.910]It's about eight or nine months before now and corn planting
[00:15:13.550]what's going to happen to that nitrogen
[00:15:15.520]is going to be very interesting to see.
[00:15:18.280]What we plan on doing is just planting corn
[00:15:21.440]without any fertilizer and maybe doing some pre-plant
[00:15:25.040]nitrogen analysis in a soil to see
[00:15:26.940]if there's any difference.
[00:15:28.890]So we gonna provide that information additionally.
[00:15:32.190]Another thing that kinda got I was surprised with
[00:15:36.540]is just how little residue was there after this year's crop.
[00:15:40.370]We did not have a stripper header,
[00:15:42.010]but we asked we have the stripper header,
[00:15:45.320]but we were not able to harvest our plots with that
[00:15:47.850]because we will lose a lot of grain.
[00:15:50.050]We harvested some of the spring wheat
[00:15:52.728]in a buffer plots with the stripper header,
[00:15:57.610]which was really hard.
[00:15:58.980]It was very short and we did not have as many,
[00:16:03.870]I mean, we were risking about running that header
[00:16:06.480]to the ground.
[00:16:07.313]So stripper header is gonna be really hard
[00:16:09.730]in a year like this.
[00:16:11.850]So there was not a lot of residue either
[00:16:14.050]So if you're looking to build up the residue
[00:16:16.170]with spring wheat, I'm not sure if that's the way to go
[00:16:19.890]Maybe, you know, going back to milo
[00:16:22.210]instead of spring wheat or continuing corn
[00:16:24.310]may be even better in terms of residue cover.
[00:16:27.120]But one thing that we forget is spring wheat
[00:16:32.470]doesn't tiller as much
[00:16:33.790]and we a lot of times talk about how many pounds of residue
[00:16:38.700]we have per bushel of grain.
[00:16:40.200]And for winter wheat that actually ranges
[00:16:42.880]or a rule of thumb is like a 100 pounds of residue
[00:16:45.160]for each bushel by it's actually more than that,
[00:16:47.530]especially if you plant it a little bit early
[00:16:49.530]and over fertilize like we tend to do these days
[00:16:51.910]but just for the protein content.
[00:16:54.460]So it's about 120 pounds in spring wheat
[00:16:56.780]that's actually about 83 pounds of residue
[00:17:00.160]per bushel of grain so it's 30% less residue per bushel
[00:17:03.390]then compare it to winter wheat.
[00:17:05.510]So that's something to keep in mind going forward.
[00:17:09.190]And this is the reference I use for that information.
[00:17:12.050]So what are the conclusions?
[00:17:13.270]We have some really promising varieties
[00:17:16.090]that yielded good at still grain protein
[00:17:18.900]and bacon and milling qualities are going to be important.
[00:17:22.320]So we gonna have to do that before we make any conclusions
[00:17:25.350]of what varieties are adaptable for our environment.
[00:17:29.850]It's gonna take more than a year and multiple locations
[00:17:33.570]so that's why UNL is doing a state five variety testing
[00:17:36.960]right now and I've been told that Cody Creech
[00:17:41.600]has the information available from four locations
[00:17:44.730]in Nebraska including McCook, Grant
[00:17:47.220]and two locations in a Panhandle
[00:17:48.930]so stay tuned to look at that data as well, get informed.
[00:17:54.460]In terms of tillage, no-till was by far the best practice
[00:17:57.890]and then vertical and conventional tillage
[00:17:59.860]especially at higher nitrogen rates.
[00:18:02.550]And then the optimal nitrogen rate for this year
[00:18:04.840]was 51 pound per acre.
[00:18:08.200]Like I said that the lack of that residue up there
[00:18:11.320]kind of concerns me a little bit,
[00:18:13.620]but we haven't had a really good year for spring wheat
[00:18:16.690]That's yet to be seen of what kind of residue we can expect
[00:18:19.360]in a better year
[00:18:20.650]but rotational studies are definitely needed
[00:18:22.870]so if we're going to break out the cycle on corn
[00:18:25.880]and see what's the benefit of going one year
[00:18:28.650]into spring wheat instead of just keep doing corn
[00:18:30.840]we're gonna have to do some rotational studies
[00:18:33.280]on a side by side comparison
[00:18:34.670]and that's going to take time at least two years
[00:18:37.460]to set that up and it's going to be interesting just to see
[00:18:42.580]where it takes us.
[00:18:44.000]With that I would like to open up for any questions.

The screen size you are trying to search captions on is too small!

You can always jump over to MediaHub and check it out there.

Comments

0 Comments

Stumpf Farm - Spring Wheat Trials

Description

Searchable Transcript

Comments icon comment

Related Channels

Comments