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| I've got into this discussion late obviously, but its right up my alley, since soybean population effects on yield and the differences in commercial seeding systems are what my Thesis is based on as a Grad Student at Kansas State University. I had plots all over eastern KS last summer and do again this summer, I used five different populations Starting at 60,000 plants/acre, going up to 220,000 plants/acre, with row spacings of 15" and 7.5". I used a Great Plains no-till drill for my small plot work, and really learned to hate drills for soybean planting, because we use a JD planter at home on the farm and I see now the differences between the two ways of planting. Also in my study, we put a JD planter against a JD no-till drill and three other commercially available drills that were double-disc opener style no-till drills, and set them all to 150,000 plants/acre, and the planter blew them all away on both speed of emergence and on total emergence %. Luckily for us though, the drills used today are better than what people used to plant with, I've heard it put very well like this from professor here, "We used to plant soybeans with a wheat drill, now we plant wheat with a soybean drill." Its true to a certain degree, so since modern drills are getting better, we're trying to see how far down we can push our seeding rate and still not lose yield. Last year we found that in most of our average to low yielding environments, you could have gone down around 100,000 plants/acre (100,000 was the final stand, not the seeding rate) and not had a yield drop-off, but you still need to plant more than that to account for bad emergence and other environmental factors. I know some people out there think I'm crazy for saying this, but its what we found, remember, these are not your high yielding environments we're working with here. Unfortunatley, most of my row-spacing data is coming from this summer, so I don't really have anything to show for it yet, but another thing that people should start considering if they use a drill anyway is twin row beans maybe, I didn't see a lot of discussion in this whole conversation about that type of spacing, but from what i've seen, it can have a some advantages over 30" row and drilled beans. Anyway, just some thoughts and ideas, I'll quit talking now!! | |
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Soybean row width discussion.....again
