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Manitoba | We farm in Manitoba. we used to be 7.2" spacing (conventional tillage), then went to Nine inch zero till, then 10.5" and now 12" no till. we have not seen any decrease in yield but this is as far as I am comfortable going for now. there is one farmer in our area with a seedmaster on 14" spacing and he grows some damn nice crops, but i'll let him experiment for a while longer yet. holding up a swath gets to be a bigger problem on wider spacing, last year we had a poor crop of oats, only knee high and uneven and had to swath it and we lost a lot going under the pickup belts on the header. as far as the pro's and con's of wide spacing there is several arguments for each side. with wider spacing there is obviously more moisture conservation, but less shading for to restrict weed growth. there was a thread on here a few days back about corn plants of the future being shaped like christmas tree, with the purpose of capturing more sunlight for energy for the crop. on wide row spacings you give that up, but have better airflow through the crop which would likely reduce a certain amount of disease pressure (except for disease caused by poor crop rotation). i'd say go wider, but don't be the experiment farm, let some researcher test 18 inch spacing first. twelve works for now, and if it's not broke, don't try fix it. sorry to ramble but we have this same argument around our table everyday, nice to know we aren't the only ones confused!! | |
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Wide Row Spacings in Wheat?????/
