Relay-intercropping Wheat to Soybeans

RGMartin

Well-known Member
Has anyone on here done it? any insight?

I have read the publications from Purdue and OSU. Have talked about trying a double crop of some sort for a while, but just not quite enough season here(I-80 latitude). 3-4 weeks should be enough to let it work.

Letting wheat ground sit fallow after harvest seems like a waste. Most years getting enough water isn't an issue, though this year has been. Should let me farm more on my limited acres.
 
Have a BTO neighbor that on a few acres does double crop. Plants winter wheat, the when it heads out and about the milk (dough) stage, will either chop it for silage or hydroswing and roll it when it drys down enough. He then plants a short day corn. Been lucky the last couple of years. This is on the I-90 corridor in South Dakota.
 
Did it work for him this year? I'm curious if the wheat held moisture over for the corn or not?

Casey in SD
 
(quoted from post at 08:54:15 09/12/12) Have a BTO neighbor that on a few acres does double crop. Plants winter wheat, the when it heads out and about the milk (dough) stage, will either chop it for silage or hydroswing and roll it when it drys down enough. He then plants a short day corn. Been lucky the last couple of years. This is on the I-90 corridor in South Dakota.

I think that would be a true "double crop" if the wheat was off before the corn planted.

I am looking at planting beans into standing wheat, timed so the beans are 6-8" tall when the wheat comes off. Will have to play with row spacings on various equipment to keep tires and openers off the wheat.
 
study just finished by osu tech,indicates that a cover crop,such as wheat,oats etc,doesnt use moisture from a following crop.that the moisture content in the soil is basicaly the same. according to this study the moisture used is moisture that would have been lost anyway by fallowing between crops. timing has always been the key when double or even triple cropping. finding a crop that will mature and be harvested in the time you have is the biggest problem. we always planted wheat in corn rows years ago,even had drills made for just this. but back then we were harvesting corn largely by hand. how much you would lose of the wheat when machine harvesting i couldnt say. I've never done it since we grew very little corn ,never enough to machine harvest. One thing i would be interested in knowing is what this does to insects such as corn worm. one advantage of corn/ soybean rotation is the beans help keep insects down to an extent. i dont think wheat would do this, so that may be a consideration. like I say i'm not a corn person,way too dry on most of my places,but we always planted wheat with corn years ago when we did raise it,and i dont recall the wheat overstressing the corn any more than our normal lack of rainfall did.
 
have you thought about wheat/oats? lots of folks did that here years ago,wouldnt be near the money crop,but someone posted on here a short while back that oats were $4 a bushel or so this year. and since you use basicaly the same equipment that may make it more advantagous.
 
(quoted from post at 10:41:32 09/12/12) have you thought about wheat/oats? lots of folks did that here years ago,wouldnt be near the money crop,but someone posted on here a short while back that oats were $4 a bushel or so this year. and since you use basicaly the same equipment that may make it more advantagous.

Late planted oats are done locally as forage after wheat, but the grain quality is awful. They don't like the heat later in the season. If they actually make a crop we get oats that weight in the mid 20's.


I was looking for info on the polymer coated bean seed that was on the market a number of years ago, but it would seem Monsanto killed the program. Supposed to have allowed a 3-4 week delay in germination.
 
I've read alot of articles on the subject. I was just curious being the drought we are experiencing this year. I'm an hour north of the I-90 corridor so it was close enough for comparison, although they are worse off then us down there. None the less, the little bit of rain we finally got helped the beans. Seeing alot of 30-40 bushel. The corn on the other hand was done already. Seeing anywhere from 5-75 bushel so far. Haven't heard of any over a 100 yet. Mind you the 75 bushel corn in a normal year would be 175.

Casey in SD
 

Most of it looks good from the road, but get past the headlands and it goes down hill real quick. Corn holds the heat in, I picked one patch that looked decent from the road last week and had nothing in the center.
 

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