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No-till organic bean photo sequence and comments
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jbgruver
Posted 11/12/2016 21:27 (#5633921)
Subject: No-till organic bean photo sequence and comments



We finished harvesting our soybeans plots at the WIU Organic Research Farm yesterday.

Our drilled no-till soybeans were the highest yielding beans on the farm (~ 70 bu/a for the whole experiment). Our 30" beans with good weed control also yielded well but the few acres where we did not have good weed control averaged ~20 bu/a lower.

Our current plan is to plant a higher % of our beans no-till in 2017 and to blind cultivate (tine weeder and/or rotary hoe) our 30" conventional till beans more aggressively.

the attached document contains a sequence of pics of our 2016 no-till soybean plots as well as some other soybean plots for comparison.

our no-till organic soybeans always get started much slower than our conventional till beans but have yielded equal or better than the conventional till beans every year but 1 (2012).

here are a few ideas why our NT beans yielded so well this year:

All soybeans in our area yielded very well this year.

A dry June reduced weed germination while our NT soybeans were still small.

Timely rains in July and August supported excellent pod set and very large bean size.

The field where we had our NT soybean plots this season was slated for beans in 2015 but ended up never getting planted due to extreme rainfall and standing water for over a month in June/July.

When things finally dried out, we terminated the weeds with shallow tillage several times and drilled "Fridge" triticale (~80 lbs/a) in mid-September 2015. The stand was not as strong as intended (germ tests of the seed were low) but the triticale tillered very well and we ended with excellent biomass production in spring 2016.

We intended to drill the soybeans into standing triticale but did not have access to a tractor with guidance when we decided it was time to plant (5/30, a little over a week after pollination started). So we rolled the triticale with a cultimulcher, flagged the plots and used a 15' JD 750 NT drill (7.5" row spacing) to plant two soybean varieties (Blue River Hybrids 34A7 and 39C4) @ ~ 220k/a. I rolled the plots a second time just over a week later.

There was very little foxtail in the NT plots and ~ 0.5 hr/a of walking removed most of the broad leaf weeds (velvet leaf and water hemp).

***********************************************

In 2017 we plan to plant some NT organic beans on 30" and 15" rows, in addition to drilling on 7.5" rows.

Joel
WIU Agriculture


Edited by jbgruver 11/13/2016 19:11




Attachments
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Attachments 2016NTSequence.pdf (1368KB - 773 downloads)
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