Wheat producers share 100-bushel tips

COULTERVILLE, Ill. — At the 2020 Illinois Wheat Association annual meeting, a first-time panel of Illinois wheat farmers shared tips and tricks for 100-bushel yields with a live audience.

This year, at the 2021 Illinois Wheat Association virtual meeting, the audience followed along at their homes as the popular panel made a return appearance.

The farmers who had the top three yields in the 2021 Illinois Wheat Association yield contest discussed their high-yielding wheat crops and answered audience questions.

The panelists included David Justison of Montgomery County, who had the top yield of 126.77 bushels per acre; Dan Rubin in Fayette County, president of the Illinois Wheat Association, with a yield of 124.73 bushels per acre; and Dale Wehmeyer of St. Clair County, with a yield of 119.4 bushels per acre.

Moderator Dean Campbell, a wheat farmer and secretary of the Illinois Wheat Association, congratulated all of the 18 participants who finished the contest and noted that the extraordinary yields were unheard of in years past.

“We had numerous yields above 100 bushels which, as I recall growing up, was unheard of, at least in Illinois,” Campbell said.

How is your wheat crop looking this year compared to other years and how has local weather been for your crop?

Rubin: “I’m in south-central Illinois and it’s been a really mild winter here. We have good stands. It was dry when we planted and it didn’t all come up until we got rain, but it looks like it’s evened out pretty well. Everything looks good. We’ll be applying our first pass of nitrogen probably in early February or as soon as the ground freezes up where we can travel.”

Wehmeyer: “We actually walked our wheat fields this past week and what we found is, depending on planting date and variety, we’ve got some that is very thick and we’ve got six or seven tillers on them, which is more than we would have liked to see so that first application is going to be backed off quite a bit on the nitrogen side. We’ve got other ones where we’ve got two and three tillers, which is really perfect. We actually did apply some nitrogen this week. It’s an issue with trying to get over these fields with the ground being frozen.”

Justison: “Wheat looks real good so far this winter. We’ve had a mild winter. We’ll start applying nitrogen next week. What I’ve found in the past is when the wheat looks really good in the wintertime, it’s time to buy hail insurance.”

What are the winter annual weeds to be concerned about? Will a dense stand control most of them?

Justison: “It depends on the year. This year, some fields, we had some winter annuals start and, actually, for the first time, I sprayed Harmony this fall on probably 600 acres that normally I would wait and do in the spring.”

Rubin: “We usually spray our Harmony in the spring. We’ve tried it in the fall, but usually the ground is too wet in the fall to get over it, but your henbit and chickweed and then onions and wild garlic, we use Harmony and when I used the Harmony, I use it by itself, I don’t like to mix it with anything else. We may end up making five or six passes. We have our own sprayer and we may end up making five or six passes over the field in any given season.”

Wehmeyer: “We apply Harmony in the spring and our thinking is that anything that competes with that wheat plant to be successful, you need to get rid of it. You think about henbit and chickweed, they compete for nutrients, they compete for moisture, they’ll compete for sunlight, they compete for space. All those things are factors that can, in fact, hurt your wheat yields, so we want to eliminate those.”

Campbell: “We are running no-till strictly behind the combine, but we’ll go in and spray Roundup and take out anything that’s green. That’s our goal, especially cheat or something like that, that might be in the field that would be very competitive.”

Have any of you tried relay cropping?

Justison: “I have had neighbors who have tried that in the past and it didn’t work out real well for them. It depends a lot on the weather. I would much rather drill the beans and get them where they belong.”

Rubin: “I have had neighbors fly beans into the standing wheat. Even in a really wet year, it’s failed. I’ve never seen it successful.”

Wehmeyer: “It’s back to getting that seed in the ground. I walked the fields of a farmer who tried to do it and I was very unimpressed with the way the crop looked after he was done putting it in. I’m after bushels and that’s the name of the game — how am I going to create the bushels that I can get off of each acre?”

What are the panelists’ favorite wheat varieties?

Justison: “I have five varieties this year. You need to spread it out a little bit. I’ve had very good luck with AgriMAXX 454. We have some 495, some 485. I’ve also raised Pioneer in the past and they have some very good wheat, but I’ve had the best luck with the AgriMAXX numbers.”

Rubin: “We grow our seed production for Pioneer. This year we have 25R74 and 25R61 and I like both of them. You just have to manage them.”

Wehmeyer: “We are exclusive AgriMAXX. We have several experimentals we look at and the reason I do those myself is because it gives me a real good idea of its performance. I can feel it, I can smell it, I can walk in it and I learn a lot about it. I know how it’s been managed so, at the end, when a combine runs through it, I have a pretty good comparison of the variety’s performance.”

What seeding rates do you use?

Justison: “It depends on the variety, but I will go anywhere from 120 to 145 pounds, depending on the seed size. Depending on my monitor, I can run 1.2 million to about 1.7 million seeds per acre.”

Rubin: “We go 1.6 million to 1.7 million and we go all by seed size. Pounds are a factor, but we do it by seed size, just like beans.”

Wehmeyer: “We’re in the 1.5 million, maybe 1.6 million, but what I keep in mind is my planting date. If I’m in the first week of October, maybe up to the 10th, that’s maybe what my target would be, but once I get past that, I’ll start bumping my planting rate. We’re in that 1.5 million, 1.6 million range and, again, when you do those calculations, that’s seeds in the ground, not scattered on top or planted shallow.”