Stumpf Farm - Spring Wheat Trials

University of Nebraska – Lincoln Author

08/31/2020 Added

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

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Stumpf Farm - Spring Wheat Trials

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