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Grand Rapids, MI | OK, let me first say it has been a while since I been involved in the agronomy side of things (am a management consultant now), but back when I was managing a farm, one of my projects was to work seriously on our wheat yields. Mich State had a program back then trying to do the same which was very helpful. Here are a few things I learned about wheat in Michigan. Realize also we planted SRW wheat. There should be some similarities though.
As to planting seeds/ac...ABSOLUTELY AGREED with the others. Although we always planted higher than what others are posting here. Not sure if that is a climate thing...or personal preference...or increased knowledge since I learned. We would start at 1.8 Million late September and increase to 2.5 Million by mid-October. If it wasn't in by then we called it too late. I would highly recommend finding a no-till drill. If by old JD drill you mean a 8300 style where the openers just bounce along, I would do everything i could to find a better drill.
I always liked to put down 20-25# of N in the fall, along with P & K as recommended by soil test. Most of our soils were quite high in P (>100 lbs/ac) so we rarely put on any P. Your N in the spring though sounds low compared with what we did. 50 pounds of Urea I would think is not nearly enough. If you are saying 50# of actual N, you are probably getting closer. We generally did 100-120# of Urea (40-50# actual N) ideally just before the last frost came out of the ground. This was sometimes tough to time just right though, ended up flying it on w/ an airplane a couple times when the fields stayed wet too long. Then we did 15g of 28-0-0 cut with 5-10g ofwater (less burn) just before feekes 6.
I won't say a lot about fungicides at this point, as the other posters mentioned that is a next year thing. I will say though that we benefited GREATLY from hiring a scout that knew wheat. I find that proflactic fungicide treatments rarely pay (possibly excepting folicur for FHB, but only again if it is indicated by timing and weather forcasts) A good scout can monitor the wheat and you can use the right fungicide only if needed and then just at the right time. The scout was really helpful for us since the time diseases effected our yield was right during corn and soy planting...you can guess how well we did getting out there to scout ourselves...lol.
Hope some of this might help, let us know if you have any more questions. On our good soils we were able to get our yield averages up to 80 bu/ac with good years going 100 bu/ac and the rare exception being as high as 120 bu/ac. This was at least a 50% increase from when we were not paying attention to the details, so it does pay to manage it.
Loren
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How to plant Winter Wheat (att. otis and luke)
