Air February 21 - 27, 2006

Soybean varieties

This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. I had the opportunity recently to visit with one of the leading Soybean production experts in the United States, Dr Palle Pedersen from Iowa State University. Dr Pedersen is getting heavy coverage in the ag press and has been really setting soybean production on its' ear of late. I really liked what he had to say... Probably because it agreed with a lot of my thoughts on soybean production. Now granted, he's in Iowa and that's a bit different than our part of Kansas, but a lot of it easily crosses over and other bits of it I'd like to see tested a little more over at Manhattan. He compared soybean production to the old water barrel and our best yields were only going to be as good as the shortest stave in the barrel. Right now he feels that the most limiting factor is soybean variety selection. In fact, planting rates and row spacing ranked down about 4th or 5th in importance. You need to be looking at multiple year replicated trials and the more years and replications involved, the better it is! This becomes a real challenge because in any one company's catalog, about 30% of the entires are going to be new in any one year. The hottest newest varieties are probably going to be harvested in Argentina next month for planting in the USA in April and May. We're lucky here in Kansas that we do have the variety testing and many of the sites do have 3 year averages for anything that's been around that long. Be leary of one years data, feel better about two years data and 3 years is best! It'll take some time and you may have to do some digging, but a lot of the information is out there, if you're willing to do your homework! This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.

Soybean planting dates and rates

This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. A lot of time is being spent arguing about soybean production and what row width do you need. In reality you could be spending a lot more time talking about something more important, like planting date. But let's talk about all those this morning. Regardless of what you are doing, 30, 15 or drilled, the trick is to plant your beans thin enough to get some branching going on. There is some indication that 15 is better than 30 and 7 better than 15, but often we can make more difference with a couple of other management considerations. Planting date and final stand. Many producers are planting way too many seeds. Seed cost, for most producers, now exceeds herbicide cost. Let's try to nudge a little more profit out of that crop by cutting our seeding rates. What I want you to think about is 75,000 plants per acre. If you are in 30 inch rows, that's one plant very 4 inches, or so, in 15's it's about 2 per foot and in 7.5 inch row spacing it's 1 per foot. Getting nervous yet? How many seeds do you need to plant? Depends on the year, the germination and your planter. Sure, drilling will require more seeds and a good planter less. But it means that once the leaves start to fall towards the end of the summer, you need to be out there counting final stands to get a handle on this. We want those plants to bush out and we want as many nodes as possible to bloom and hopefully set pods. Now planting date. When do you plant? Up in Iowa they've been planting in late April with incredible results. In some cases they are seeing as much as ¾ bushel per day for every day they planted prior to May 10th. We're all growing more beans, so let's spend a little more time learning what we can about this new crop! This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.

Soybeans, underground

This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. When I heard Dr Pedersen from Iowa State talk about hinderances to high yielding beans, I wasn't expecting his number 2 and number 3 most serious reasons to be diseases. The next thought is probably going to be, ohhh Soybean Rust, and that's what I was thinking and I was sooo wrong. Foliar diseases aren't that much of an issue for us. But the real concern is what's happening in the ground. Specifically Soybean Cyst nematode, sudden death syndrome or SDS and various other root or stem root organisms and nematodes. Let's be honest, many of us are still pretty new with soybeans. We buy seed from whomever we're buying our other seed from and use whatever they recommend, we don't tend to fertilize them very much, we spray some roundup and we hope it rains. Then if we get 25 or 35 bushel beans we seem happy and move on. We need to learn a lot more about this soybean crop, because if we can grow 80 bushel wheat or 150 bushel corn, there's no reason why we aren't growing 60+ bushel beans. But that means we start using fungicides on our seed because we're going to be planting a little bit earlier into cooler ground. We start doing some testing to see if we are dealing with cyst nematodes. We still haven't found them in Geary County, but I'll bet they are there, especially in some of the high pH fields along the Smoky Hill River. And we also start getting out there at or immediately after harvest and start digging up soybeans and looking at the roots. Are they well nodulate? Did they get good soil penetration? Were they healthy or were they full of some of the fungal organisms. We've been growing wheat all our life, but these soybeans, boy they're still kind of new and there's much we need to know!! This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.

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