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Colby, Kansas | Keep in mind I'm talking about "here" and you are obviously "there". My experience is mostly with dryland and irrigated winter wheat and mostly no-till or reduced till.
Here, 1/4 to 1/2" deep would scare the hell out of me and be a hard no. My bias on all crops is to be on the deeper end of things, for wheat we put a lot of it in at 1.5-2" if that's where we have to go for moisture (no-till). I have went 2.5" before with some varieties. Varieties with shorter coleoptiles don't ever last here, but almost anything should be able to come up from 1-1.5". When I get called out on diagnosing wheat production problems, the vast majority of them can be traced back, at least in part, to shallow planting. Most of the time it's not intentional shallow planting, its lack of ballast on the drill, poor setup for high residue, to fast of ground speed and the openers are riding up and out, etc. Very few have been due to planting too deep and when they were it also involved a seed quality/vigor issue. Here it leads to poor crown establishment, poor tillering, and more susceptibility to winter injury. Fortunately we are mostly no-till or reduced till, so soil crusting is less of a concern than it might be in a full till scanario, especially with irrigation. I have seen scenarios where the seedbed was a fine powder and once you commit to watering a person about has to stay on it until the wheat is up. If possible, I'd rather water before hand and plant into moist soil and let it come up on its own, seems to reduce the risk of crusting issues.
We have done some depth work, I'm certainly not suggesting the data is relevant to you, but food for thought. A few slides where we were comparing two different types of no-till openers. Seems I can only lay my hands one year of data at the moment, we actually did this for 4 site-years, and these slides are fairly representative of what we saw.
Lucas
Edited by LHaag 4/6/2024 09:01
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Problems with irrigated wheat planted too shallow?
