From the Fields: A love for wheat

They’re going to start harvesting wheat today, July 2. I’m working with this grower, Wendell Good, that I love working with here in central Illinois. His passion is wheat, whereas a lot of people don’t care to plant wheat or harvest wheat in the middle of July when it’s 100 degrees outside. He loves wheat. I do, too.

He won the wheat yield contest last year in Illinois. He grew 147.73-bushel wheat, and he’s tasked us with growing 170-bushel wheat this year. I consult him on some of the nutritional portions of it, the agronomy and things like that.

This has been highly managed. We’ve used the tissue tester to determine what we need. We use stress-mitigation products on it. We’ve used plant growth regulators. We’ve used micronutrients, ocean minerals and things like that. We’ve done a couple fungicide passes. We did about six or seven foliar passes with the drone for timely nutrient applications.

There’s the challenge of trying to keep it standing and then get it harvested here in a timely fashion. We’ll see how it works out, but it looks really good. It looks promising. Between the number of heads out there, the size of the kernels and the weight of the kernels, I think we have a chance.

He has an 80-acre field that we plant three varieties in. We’ll go along the ends and see which one kind of tests the best, and then I think it’s a 10-acre plot that we’ll harvest and then weigh. He’ll plant soybeans after the wheat is harvested.

With this high-yielding wheat is a ton of biomass. There’s a lot of nutrients tied up in the wheat. One thing we’re gonna try this year, after he plants it, is apply a residue digester. So, we’ll try and fire up the microbes to try and break down some of that and release those nutrients for those soybeans.

I should measure and find out exactly how much biomass is out there. I’m sure it’s a couple hundred pounds of nitrogen, a couple hundred pounds of phosphorus and a couple hundred pounds of potassium that we need to keep cycling.

The good news is it’s pulled out of the soil and so it’s not tied up in the soil anymore which is one of the benefits of doing the wheat crop, but we’ve got to make it available to the soybeans from the wheat.