Welcome to another growing season! So far, 2021 is off to a better start than 2019 (when I first started this series) and even 2020. I’m following the same two fields as last year, but the crops growing in them have flip-flopped. Our farm operates on a two-year rotation, which means that every other year a field will grow corn with soybeans grown in the in-between years.
As I’ve talked about before, the growing season starts wayyy before planting – in fact, we had the seed picked out for each field and ordered within a few weeks of finishing up harvest. We planted the cover crops that overwintered in each of this year’s soybean fields the same day or following day after we harvested corn last fall. We also strip-tilled all of this year’s corn fields within days of soybean harvest last fall.
But planting is when things start to spring to life. And a couple of weeks after planting is when it really looks like a productive field, which is why I start my #FollowtheField updates about a week or so after planting.
This is me planting this year’s featured soybean field, which happens to be the field that I own a small piece of, along with my grandma and my dad. See the cover crops in the field behind me?
Here’s a better shot of what was going on behind the tractor. This is our planter. We use the same planter for both corn and soybeans. There are two rows of boxes arranged at 15-inch intervals, allowing us to plant soybeans in 15-inch rows (or 15 inches between each row) by using all 23 boxes in both rows. We plant corn using only the back boxes, which allows our corn to be spaced in 30-inch rows.
We invested in our autosteer system last fall to make sure that everything was working correctly, as we’ve had some problems with the tractor drifting and not driving where it was supposed to in past years. This made it really easy for us to plant soybeans right between each row of cereal rye that was planted using the same planter last fall – all we did was shift the tractor over 7.5 inches from where it would’ve been driving last fall. Worked out great and freed me up to take more pictures with my phone since I didn’t need to steer. 🙂
Here’s what the front of the tractor looked like. It’s a little nerve-wracking at first to be driving squarely on something green and growing in the field (not normally something you want to do). When we planted, this cereal rye cover crop was probably about 8-10 inches tall, so not real big. Today, it’s about 2-2.5 feet tall.
And now for the first crop-specific updates of the season…
May 7, 2021 Update:
Soybeans (14 days)
We plant soybeans first on our farm and we’ve done so (or planned to do so) for the last several years now. Traditionally, corn was always planted first, then soybeans. Research shows that early-planted soybeans tend to yield better than later-planted soybeans (so think late April vs. mid- to late May). Soybeans grow differently than corn does – corn pretty well follows a precise timeline from planting to harvest and will switch over to reproductive growth after it takes in so many growing degree days (we’ll talk about this later in the season). On the other hand, soybeans grown in central Illinois are typically determinate varieties. Soybeans will focus on vegetative growth (getting taller and adding leaves) until the summer solstice in late June. As soon as the days start to get shorter, soybeans will cease vegetative growth and begin to focus on reproductive growth, which is when it begins to develop the pods with beans that we eventually harvest. The more time we can give soybeans to grow before the summer solstice, the more potential pods it can carry, hence better yield.
These soybeans were planted on Friday, April 23rd – two weeks ago – and received a nice drink of rain the next day. As you can see from the photos, they’re just starting to emerge from the soil.
With a normal field of soybeans, we wouldn’t do much after planting until it was time to scout for weeds about a month later. But because we have a cover crop in this field, we had to spray to kill the cover crop so that it doesn’t compete with the soybeans for sunlight and moisture – it did the job we needed it to do this winter. Our goal was to kill the cover crop 10 days after planting, allowing us to “plant green” and reap more benefits of the additional biomass the cover crop added as the weather turned warmer, but we’ve had some rain in the last week that meant it didn’t get done until yesterday (5/6). We decided to use Roundup because it’s an effective herbicide to kill the cereal rye, wouldn’t hurt the beans, and is less expensive than other herbicides. The cover crop should be brown by next week’s update.
See how much taller this cover crop got in just two weeks? It easily tripled in size and would definitely block sunlight from the soybeans if we didn’t terminate it. Because of the cover crop, we’ll also be on the lookout for potential insect issues – namely armyworms in these fields – that could harm the very young soybean plants.
And I’ll end the soybean update with a photo of a soybean quite literally breaking through the soil surface as it emerges. Seedlings are a lot stronger than they might appear.
Corn (10 days)
I don’t have a real exciting update for corn yet because it hasn’t actually emerged in any of our fields. All of our corn was planted in a two-day window, with this field planted on April 27th. As you can see in the pictures above and below, there’s not a lot of life in this field quite yet. We plant corn seeds two inches below the soil surface. While the corn has germinated, it’s still got about another inch to go before it breaks through the soil surface and officially emerges. I dug a small trench in the row to see what was going on underground, but being careful not to disturb the seedling. It definitely looks like a corn shoot and has plenty of moisture where its roots are to give it a good start to the season.
You can kind of make it out in this photo, but this field (and all of our corn fields) were strip tilled last fall. That means that we placed fertilizer exactly where we would plant rows of corn in the spring. With the help of autosteer, we got the rows directly on top of the strips (or pretty close), making sure the seedlings won’t have to work very hard to find fertilizer. This is good for both crop growth (roots easily reach the fertilizer) and making sure we don’t waste any fertilizer. We were actually able to reduce how much fertilizer we applied by doing this, so we’ll see if that was a good decision or not later in the season. 😉
That’s all for this week’s #FollowtheField update. Catch next week’s update right here at this time next Friday!