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| My opinion has always been to plant wheat essentially as shallow as possible when moisture is good in heavy soil. I have seen plenty of times the wheat have really poor tillering and just poor vigor overall when planted too deep, especially in dry powdery hilltop areas. Im wondering if anyone has strong opinions on wheat planting depth and if anyone has had problems with wheat sprouting then drying out and dying when planted too shallow? Or any other problem being too shallow? In the last 12 years I've been on the farm I've never seen a field that was hurt because it was planted too shallow. Dad makes me uncomfortable how deep he likes to plant the wheat and his greatest love seems to be running that grain drill. We have mostly heavy soils and usually have the ability to turn pivots on when moisture is needed after planting. All our ground is irrigated with most being pivots.
Seems to me that the shallower you can plant wheat the more vigor it has once it is up and better tillering. I've always been a little uncomfortable with how deep our wheat is in the ground at planting and I notice sometimes in parts of the field where there is more compaction or less tillage depth the wheat seems to do better early on. Even 1/2 inch depth bothers me when the moisture is good I'd rather be at 1/4 inch. I'm bewildered by recommendations of 1 inch or greater but assume that's just drykand conditions with unique moisture challenges compared to irrigated. One year we put new discs on our drill and with those sharp beveled edges and the same settings it was putting the seed too deep at closer to 3/4 inch. I felt like that really hurt the tillering and yield that year and yields were down about 15-20 bushel overall. We are in an area with very high yields 115-130+ bushels per acre on hard white spring 150+ on winter wheat. Sometimes pushing 180 on spring barley.
Edited by Idahoagronomist 4/5/2024 08:06
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Problems with irrigated wheat planted too shallow?
