The following commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of AgWeb or Farm Journal Media. The opinions expressed below are the author's own.
The following commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of AgWeb or Farm Journal Media. The opinions expressed below are the author's own.
As a farm machinery mechanic and writer, Dan brings a hands-on approach that only a pro can muster. Along with his In the Shop blog, Dan writes a column by the same name as well as the Shop Series for Farm Journal magazine. Always providing practical information, he is a master at tackling technical topics and making them easy for all of our readers to understand. He and his wife, Becky, live near Bouton, Iowa.
I'm going to cheat a bit and base this blog on a story by Chris Bennett in the March 2018 issue of Farm Journal Magazine.
In that story Bennett focuses on how soybean growers are pushing yields beyond the 100 bushel mark. Genetics, fertility and biologicals play a role, but I'm interested in a couple "mechanical" points in the story. One consideration that may improve soybean yields is seeding rate. Dropping from 160,000 ppa down to 145,000 ppa (final stand) encouraged increased branching and reduced competition between plants for moisture and nutrients. It also reduced seed costs per acre.
Bennett notes in his story that the grower tried to maintain 1-inch to 1.5-inch spacing between seeds to reduce intra-row competition. If competition reduction proves to be a major factor in improving soybean yields, I predict we'll see more attention paid to precise seed placement. The old standard of, "You're planting beans right if you see one or two seeds on top of the ground every foot or so…" could well change to maintaing depth control as precisely as we do for corn.
A final fascinating comment from the story was that higher yielding soybeans are going to require changes in the way we adjust combines. Bean varieties with thick, woody stems make it harder to thresh the beans from the pods, and harder to separate the beans from the viney, sometimes greenish stems. An agronomist from a major soybean seed producer slapped me on the shoulder recently and chuckled, after I complained that some of their soybean strains had such thick stems that they wore out sickles on harvesting platforms in a day or less. "You ain't seen nothing yet, " he said. He held up his index finger. "That's the size of the soybean stem of the future."
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