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Coldwater, Michigan | Many of you who read my comments know that I have done a lot of replicated plot work. Oftentimes, when I wanted to try something my 4 row 30" plot planter wouldn't accomplish, I would take my idea to Michigan State University, and with the proper incentive (money to fund the project), sometimes they would cooperate.
First understand, I was a DSM for Alpine Plant Foods for many years. We set many a planter and drill up to seed place liquid starter on corn/soys/and wheat. Corn and wheat were a no-brainer for seed placement, it just plain worked and was easy to show the performance, if the equipment was properly set up. The problem was soybeans. As sensitive as soybeans are to seed burn, we obviously never set up a planter, or drill, if we could help it with a squeeze pump. The surge would nail the soys before they ever got started!
On soys we were able to show a consistent increase in no-till if we planted before the soils warmed up. Actually in no-till it wasn't that hard to show the increase. But in conventional till 30", or drilled, we were always wondering if it was worth it, or not. I was with my 30" planter always able to do the replications of with vs w/o, and with different application rates/acre for 30" rows. However, there was no good way for me to do quality replicated plots in other row widths. Here comes MSU for Bill's next project: The Soybean State yield plot program was making some changes to the equipment they had. They had come to the conclusion that the method they were using for applying Ridolmil (?) to their soybean plots wasn't working that well. I was able to provide some nice liquid equipment for them to accomplish that goal. In turn they agreed to do some private plot work for me.
Remember me saying we had some issues with getting soybeans to yield more when we applied fertilizer on the seed? We never had yield losses when we used appropriately safe fertilizer materials, we just never had wonderful increases, either.
At MSU we had them use their 15" row planter: they seeded 140,000 seeds in the 15" rows, they seeded 160,000, they seeded 180,000 seeds, and they seeded 210,000 seeds/acre. They also used several different rates of fertilizer. What I was trying to find out: was there a better recommendation on seed placed soybean fertilizer than what we were recommending. After all, we were having issues with whether it was worthwhile, or not.
We discovered in 15" rows: there wasn't a nickles worth of difference in yield between starter/no starter, no matter the population, until we got to 210,000 seeds per acre. At that point, it didn't matter what the fertilizer rate was, we had a nice increase in yield compared to the no starter treatment. Next year same result.
Meanwhile the corn program guys got involved. Actually, they had done some work for us before. They were able to take us in 30" rows/22" rows/and 15" rows. They also tried different populations. They had a finer difference in the way they split the population. And they found pretty much the same thing as the soybean guys did. Different farms, different planting dates, different fertility programs, same basic results. In this case we had the row width factor. Again the row widths did not show much difference in yield between each other, or when we applied the fertilizer in furrow. But narrower were "more" likely (though insignificant) to show better results to the fertilizer. In this case, when we got the population to 190,000 seeds/acre (these were 15" rows) the soybean yield went up. When we applied the fertilizer treatment we had a "significant" difference in yield compared to the unfertilized treatment in the 190,000 count area (15" rows). Next year pretty much same result.
So the question becomes: is Kip seeing some of the difference he does, because he is using higher seed counts, and those populations are using the fertility of the field better than are the lower populations?
Just one of my "SWAGs" ?
Edited by Bill Moyer 1/4/2009 14:44
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Kip Cullers comments below
