I think of a spectrum of grass seed to corn:

How do you plant grass seed to fill in a bare spot in the yard? Basically just broadcast a handfull of seed out by hand or with a spinner spreader, rake it in, water it and it will grow and fill in the spot.

On the other hand you would never plant corn like that - for corn you want to singulate each seed, space them properly from each other, get each seed to proper depth and cover it with good seed to soil contact. If you plant it like the grass seed above either it will not grow or will just be like a weed.

Grass seed COULD be singulated and planted like corn and it would be a better stand but it is not economical to do so at grass seed prices.

So you can think of a "spectrum" planting with say grass seed on one end and corn on the other.

Wheat is closer to the grass seed end of this spectrum, usually planted by a drill which more or less has a controlled dump of seed behind a how or disk which uually doesn't have the precision of a corn planter. Corn on the other hand is almost always planted by a more precision type planter to control seed spacing depth and slot closure. In fact in German the word for a row crop planter is "einzelkornmaschinen' (sp?) as I translate it "single seed [corn] machine". Apologies to any posters from Germany on my spelling.

So if we think of wheat at one ond of the spectrum and corn at the other, soybeans are maybe halfway in between the two ends.

Beans CAN be and are planted with a drill at times in a controlled "dump" by a seed cup in rows 6" to 10" apart. This usually requires a population of about 200,000 seeds per acre (JD used to recaommend 225k with the 750 drill) to get a decent stand.

Beans CAN also be planted with a corn planter at 130,000-150,000 seeds per acre with a corn planter.

With some variations for geographic location, variety and disease factors (some diseases such as white mold are much more common in the drilled narrow rows), both of these will yield about the same.

So then some other factors entering the decision on which way to plant soybeans are which machine do you have, how many acres do you want to plant (planters can often be wider than drills), what is the relative cost of the seed (maybe 2/3 a bag of seed difference per acre for little or no yield difference), do you need to be running both a drill and plnter att he same time, etc, etc.

So the discussion about bean row spacing, planter vs drill, can go on indefinitely because there is no one answer. Beans are about in the middle of the grass to corn spectrum.

Currently for many folks, operations and locations, due to the cost of bean seed there is a trend and financial advantage to treating beans more like corn.

At yesterday's strip till meeting in N IA there were at least 2 presenters showing pictures of 30" strip tilled beans into corn stalks. As I recall they both said there was little or no yield difference between the strip tilled 30" beans and beans grown in other more conventional local methods.

This is particularly attractive in northern areas where it is felt that beans into corn "requires" some tillage. But that is another topic....

I'll add an older picture of 30" beans spring strip tilled into 30" corn stalks in MN.

Jim at Dawn

Sorry about the hat - this picture is about 5 years old!

(DawnStriptillBeansOnCorn062304_DCP2142_72.jpg)

DawnStriptillBeansOnCorn062304_DCP2142_72.jpg (75KB - 218 downloads)