MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

 - For Dennis's talk. All right, here we go. - [Dennis] Hi, I'm Dennis Pennington, Wheat Extension Specialist for Michigan State University. Part of my job includes the variety trial management program for wheat. We test about 115 varieties of wheat every year. About 60% of those are commercially available lines from about 13 or 14 different seed companies. And the other 40% are experimental lines. Not only our own that we develop here at MSU, but also from these other seed companies. So we're able to see kind of what the new genetics look like coming down the line through these other companies, as well as our own out in the field here and the trials that we plant around the state. I also conduct a bunch of agronomy research projects on wheat, as well as work with our wheat breeder, Dr. Eric Olson, and together, we plant all the breeding trials and seed increases and whatnot. So glad to be here today to visit with you. So I've got a few things I'm gonna talk about, but the first thing I wanna talk about is herbicide application in wheat. These set of slides came from Dr. Christy Sprague And so I want to give her credit for them. This is a research project that she had last year on some wheat trials that she had planted at three locations at the Saginaw Valley Research Extension Center on our main campus at the Agronomy Farm, and then down at the Kellogg Biological Station. And the goal was to just kind of make or do an evaluation of eight different herbicides. And you can see those listed here and then the rates that were applied. And then we had an untreated control as kind of a check for that as well. The original goal here was to test the tolerance of these herbicides or tolerance of weed, excuse me to these herbicides and head through those three locations. So this is what the plot looked like at the Saginaw Valley Research and Extension Center. And you can see in the background here, these orange flags and these orange flags represent the boundaries between the plots. So if there was injury, you would see strips going north and south, the same as the power line here, but you really can't see any strips or any differences here between them, which means we really didn't have any herbicide injury at this location. And in fact, that was also the case at the Kellogg Biological Station. There was no visible injury at either location. Now that is not true at the Agronomy farm location, which this site is located just across the road. The Agronomy Farm would be just to the left here, and we're looking south toward the vet clinic and animal diagnostics, and population control building here. But if you look in this plot of wheat, you can see some strips that look a little bit different here. And you'll notice that there is a little bit of injury here in the background here, you see the white flags, these white flags indicate each of the different strips that apply to different products. So here's a strip right here that looks like it had a little bit damage on it. Here's a strip that maybe looks a little bit more normal. So if you get a little bit closer here, we can start to identify based on treatments here. This first strip that's outlined in yellow here is Affinity BroadSpec. You can see a little bit of damage in these plots. These blue boxes represent Osprey Xtra. And if you look at these passes here, you can see that the crop canopies is not uniform, looks like there's some spots where the wheat is damaged or dimmed a little bit. And then the two green ones over here are Osprey, excuse me, PowerFlex HL. And so you can see a little bit of difference in them where some of the strips in between tend to look a little bit more green, a little bit more uniform in development. So the question is how much injury did we have and then kind of get at the question. So what caused it and does it cause any yield impacts on the crop? So 14 days after treatment, her crew went out and evaluated the amount of injuries. So on the axis over here, we've got the percent of injury, and then we've got each the different products on the bottom here. And so the one that had the highest amount of injury was Osprey Xtra that was a 25% injury, next was PowerFlex HL that had about 9% injury rating followed by Affinity BroadSpec at about 7%. And then Axial Bold. Stinger had a little bit of visual injury, but not very bad. And then Quelex, Talinor and Huskie didn't have any injury that was visible 14 days after treatment. And if you look at a picture of the plots at that time, at 14 days after application, the untreated check looks, you know, it's got the... The wheat looks nice and green. The canopy is closing nicely, and everything looks pretty good. Where in the Osprey Xtra, this strip, you can still clearly see the rows. There's a little bit of a yellowish tint to it. And it looks like some of the plants are a little bit stunted and not growing quite as good as the untreated control. And then if you go a little bit closer toward harvest, this is after heading and flowering, and you can see the difference in this untreated check strip. You know, as you look across the strip to the far end of the field down there, you can see, excuse me, you can see that it looks much more uniform compared to this strip here. There clearly is some injury in this strip on the Osprey Xtra. So the question is what caused that herbicide injury at just this MSU location? 'Cause we didn't see any of this injury at the Saginaw Valley Research and Extension Center or the Kellogg Biological Station. So how come we saw the injury here, but not at the other locations? Well, this is a chart showing the temperatures for the month of April. So beginning of April, all the way to the end of April on this chart. And then here's your temperatures on the left here. The red line represents the max air temperature during the day, the blue line represents the minimum air temperature. So it's your daily high and daily low, basically. This is when the Saginaw Valley Research and Extension Center was sprayed. So it got up to 80 degrees that day, you know, and your April 7th, you're pretty early in the season, a really nice, warm spell. It got down to about in the low 50s overnight. So your average temperature is up here somewhere in that like 65 range. So, really a bit unusual to have that warm, that early in the season. This is when KBS was sprayed, Kellogg Biological Station. So your daily high got up to 60 but it did get a little bit cooler. It went down into the low 30s that night, but it was preceded by some warmer temperatures here, notice that. We had one cold day prior to that, but it had been warmer. And then this is where we made the application at the campus location at the Agronomy Farm. And you can see the daily high got just above 50 and it got down into the mid 30s here, but look at what happened two or three days ahead. It had been very cold with overnight lows, down into the low 20s and highs, not even making it to 50. So we had these cold temperatures that we think impacted the application at the campus location. And it's these cold temperatures that caused the injury here, where it did not cause the injury at the other two locations. So how much actual yield loss was there, really? This is the percent of yield loss or percent of loss, or percent of yield, excuse me. And as you can see with the mean separation letters, here you go at AA all across the top there, those means that there was not significant yield loss compared to the untreated control here, the check. But look at Osprey Xtra and PowerFlex. They had a 33 and 25% reduction in yield respectively. So some significant injury occurred with these two products when the temperatures were cold outside. So just to kind of wrap up the discussion about making herbicide application and these are some important points because every year it seems that when we're trying to put herbicide on in the spring, we run into some cold temperatures and you're trying to find days that are not windy when the field conditions are right to make herbicide application, finding a window where you can get out there and do a good job with your herbicide application can be difficult. So here's just kind of some rules for us to follow. Apply herbicides only when weeds are actively growing, And you should not apply when the crop is under stress from any of these things, cold temperatures, wide fluctuations in day or night temperatures, frost, temperatures below freezing prior to, at, or immediately following the applications. So you gotta kind of be paying attention to your weather forecast. If it's supposed to be freezing the next day, it might be warm the day you're making the application, but if it's gonna be below freezing and really cold the next day, you may wanna delay that application. And so a good rule of thumb is to only apply herbicides to winter wheat when the daily temperature is 50 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. So that would be your average. So let's say it got up to 60 during the day and the overnight low was 40. That average is 50. So that would be a good day to make an application for herbicide. But if you're... Just know that you can make applications colder than that, but if you do, you're running the risk that you can cause some herbicide injury to the crop. So I just wanna give a final shot out to Dr. Christy Sprague for sharing this data and research with us. You know, we had kind of a challenge this last spring getting herbicide on. So we learned some good things that I think we can carry forward to help us. So let me switch gears a little bit. We got our wheat crop planted in the fall. We had a lot of rainfall that delayed soybean harvest and it also delayed wheat planting. Some people were able to get wheat planted early and it came up and it was looking green and yellow or light green and yellow, and had these strips in the field and all kinds of things going on here. And this particular field, notice the direction that we planted the wheat. And then what are these tracks here that are going on an angle? Those are combine tracks. So this field was harvested on an angle. And so you can see the compaction left behind by the combine is showing up in the wheat crop here. And this picture over here, you can see the headland area, they're spots here, where it doesn't look like the wheat has even come up at all, that it may never come up, but you know, in the back end of the field back here, it really doesn't look too bad. So maybe a compaction problem here on the headland area. Here's a picture where you can clearly see your tire lines. Now, initially when the wheat emerged, it only emerged on the tire lines but it did finally start to come up. Once it did drain out, it did back off on the rain. And so this wheat was able to come on and it was able to survive, but you can believe there's gonna be a yield penalty on the wheat in this area compared to what's over the tire lines. And it's just... It's further behind in development. It's not tillered as well. It won't be rooted as well. So you know that this is not something you wanna see. And here's another picture, just showing a little bit of different landscape and topography here, and you can see the variability in the field here. And this is, you know, none of these is what you want, if you're trying to produce a high yield wheat crop for next season. So this is another picture that I took of a field. These are your planting passes, and you can clearly see the planting passes in this entire field. And if you walk out in there and look, and what you're gonna find is the plants are yellowing. They're stunted if you dig them up. You're gonna find that they have poor root development. And generally they are coming from compacted areas and where there's abrupt changes in soil types or drainage, or topography in like what you saw in some of those pictures in the previous slide. So what's going on out there in the field. What is causing this yellowing in these areas? Well, if we go back to our soil science days or classes, we might remember learning about macropore and micropore spaces. The micro or the macropore spaces generally are drained out of water under like normal field conditions. And so those macropore spaces carry oxygen. And those oxygen is needed by roots, under normal growth and development. So under continuous rainfall, these macropore spaces fill up quickly. And then normally they drain out quickly after the rain stops. But even in compacted areas, these macropore spaces will fill up but they're much slower to drain out. And so they stay water logged for a lot longer period of time. So under normal conditions, we said that the roots need the oxygen for aerobic respiration. That's the normal plant process when they are exposed to water logging for that extended period of time, they have to go into what's called anaerobic fermentation. And basically it's a survival mode that the plant goes into. And what ends up happening is you get reduced root growth, you get less nutrient uptake, you get less photosynthetic transport to the roots. And so the plants basically turn yellow. You get less tillering in the fall, and sometimes you even get some purple color. So it's this water logging that's causing the damage in these fields here and why we see these yellowing. And the different patterns that you see, you know, like in the pictures in that previous slide are just simply a fact of the difference in the drainage, either surface drainage or subsurface drainage in each of those different fields and under different conditions. Here, we have compaction caused by the planter and the tractor at planting time. There was a slide on the previous one that had compaction caused by the combine from the previous harvest. So those are all things that play a role in this, you know, kinda where we are today with this wheat crop. So if you zoom in and look a little bit closer here, and here you can see the log on, on one the tractor tires. But if you zoom in and look a little closer, you'll see purpling, and this purpling is common that I see in these areas. You don't notice it in the areas outside of the tire tracks, but you really notice it in this area where the compaction is and the purling can be caused by a couple of different things. It could be caused by temporary phosphorus deficiency. And that is due to the cold wet soils, the roots aren't growing and developing properly. They're not able to take up phosphorus like they normally would. So, you know, even if there's adequate phosphorus in the soil, the plant just may be not growing enough, which I suspect is the case here to be able to take up phosphorus that may be readily available in the soil. The second thing that it could be is this accumulation of photosynthates. So when we have these extended periods of cold, wet, rainy days followed by a day of bright sunshine, when it warms up, what happens is these go back to photosynthesizing and they actually create more photosynthates during the day than what can be translocated down to the root system. And so you get this buildup or accumulation of photosynthates in the leaves. One of them has an anthocyanin pigment that causes the leaf to turn purple. So I would expect that when this crop comes out of dormancy, this winter and begins to green up and starts to grow, you'll see this purpling disappear. I would doubt that this probably is an actual phosphorus deficiency in the field 'cause if it was, you wouldn't see the pattern in the tire track, you'd see it more broadly in the field where phosphorus levels would be low. So more than likely, this is just a temporary deficiency thing. The other thing that I'm seeing in a bunch of fields is desiccation of the leaves that is usually caused by wind damage. And basically it just dries the leaf out, in some cases where the snow is melted off, and then we had cold temperatures. It could be frost damage on the leaves as well, but you know, the plant is still dormant. The growing point is still below the soil surface. So more than likely that growing point is still alive. So just because the leaves have turned brown doesn't mean the plant is dead. So I always get the question, okay, so I gotta make a decision, do I tear this field up or not? You know, do I plan it to corn or what is the plan? Well... And what kind of yield loss should I expect? Well, it depends on a lot of things. It depends on how much damage do you have in the field? Does this area represent 5% of the field or does it represent 50% of the field? It depends on how well it's developed, how much fall tillering you had. How well does it survive the winter? What happens with our spring weather? Are there diseases that come in? Are there weed problems or weed pressures to deal with? There's a lot of things that can determine, or that still have yet to happen that will determine what your actual yield potential really is in this field. So I found a couple of studies to show kind of what, based on this water logging, you know, how much yield loss is there. And so this is a research project that was published. It's dated back in 1989. This is 30 years ago, but they waterlogged plots in the field 25 days after planting. So this is in the fall, similar to the conditions that we had this last year. And they waterlogged a field using irrigation for one day, two days, four days and six days in duration as different treatments. And they found yield losses between eight and 39% depending on what variety or how many days of a duration the water logging event occurred. Well, that can be fairly significant here. So here's another study. A little bit more recent, published back in 2016, they imposed the water logging damage at the three and four leaf stage. So a little earlier than this group did, but they look at the number of duration of days. They had treatments going as long as 60 days, they kept that field at field capacity. So they just kept irrigating every day and kept it wet for a long time. But the maximum yield penalty or yield loss was still only 30% even at 60 days. So what this is kind of telling us is that the varieties that we have today are becoming more and more resilient to stresses like this. And they're able to tolerate that water logging a little bit better than the varieties of 30 years ago. So that kind of wraps up the discussion about kinda where we are with the crop and in this last fall, and kind of where we're headed. I wanted to share with you a little bit of research that's going on in terms of planting and seeding wheat. We've got some new projects that we've been working on, and I just wanted to share a little bit of data with you on those. So we've looked quite a bit at making comparisons between the conventional drill and then this Monosem Precision Planter. And the goal here was to evaluate, can we singulate seed with a system like this? And if we can singulate seed with a system like this, does it yield more than the kind of the conventional drill. And so we have quite a bit of data in what we have shown with this precision planter is the benefit that we get from something like this is the ability to control depth much better than we can control depth here. But in terms of singulation we just... We're able to do a little better job of, you know, less skips and less doubles with this system compared to the drill but we're really not there in terms of being able to successfully singulate wheat seed. And it's because we're planting at such high population compared to corn. Our corn planters are very accurate and do a very good job of singulating seed. And you get that picket fence looking stand. This Monosem Planter is a step in that direction, but we're not quite there yet in terms of being able to accurately singulate seed with this system. So we did these trials for about four years. And so we've kind of switched gears a little bit. We're still doing comparisons of these types of planters. We've been doing these mostly in small plots, but we wanted to take it to the field and kind of ramp these trials up and take it kind of at the next level. So we're doing some of this stuff on farm, and we have included this Broadcast Incorporation concept. This has been gaining in popularity because you're able to plant, you know, much more rapidly. So we have these systems that distribute seed on the soil, and then these high speed discs or tillage tools that allow us to do some fairly controlled light tillage. And we can control the depth much better than what we could, some of the previous, you know, field cultivators and soil finishers and things like that. So we've been looking at some research at these different methods of incorporating seed, as well as the Monosomer Planter and the drill. And we've been looking at these drills at some of the farm locations as a no-till and as well as conventional till, and then we've done just a little bit of work. We've got a couple locations where we're doing some row spacing stuff yet as well. So in terms of row spacing with the drill, and then the Monosem, the five inch row spacing, you can still clearly see the rows, but when you get to the Broadcast Incorporation, there are no rows there at all to see. The seed placement is completely random and the distribution is completely random where we don't have rows. And I think there's some benefit to that in that kind of random space between seeds allows us to increase the distance between our seeds, which allows us to tiller out a little bit more. So I'll share a little bit of data, first, I wanna talk about seeding depth because there's some pretty variable or quite a bit of difference between the systems in terms of the seeding depth. So I'll share data from two different farms here. This first farm, we did the drill with conventional tillage, and we did the drill with no-till. We did the Monosem Precision Planter and then we did Broadcast Incorporated. And this was the average seeding depth of each of those different treatments here. But then this is the coefficient variation of depth. And so this is the average seeding depth. So if under conventional tillage, the drill planted every seed exactly the same depth, this coefficient of variation would be zero, there's no variability. It's all exactly the same. On the other hand, if every seed was at a different seeding depth, but the average just happened to be one that coefficient variation would be 100. So zero means that there's less variability. 100 means it's all variable. And so what you see differs between these numbers is which one is the lowest? That's the Monosem. Which one is the highest? The Broadcast Incorporated. Which makes sense, because we're not trying to control the seeding depth here. We're just Broadcast Incorporating that seed. On farm two, same kind of thing. You know, we actually got this one planted a little bit deeper than we did the first farm and our coefficient variation on depth was a little bit better, but which one had the highest? Right here, 43 that's our Broadcast Incorporation. And then these others actually were fairly close between the Monosem and then the drill. So we saw greater variability in the seeding depth in the Broadcast Incorporation. And then the other thing that's important to note, the percent stand was also lower in the Broadcast Incorporation. This is depth, but the percent stand was lower as well. So let's look at a little bit of yield data. And I've got all five farms listed up here and I've got the different treatments for each location, and they're not all the same. And the planting equipment that we used was different. We used the farms equipment, and then I brought my Monosem Planter and planted some five inch rows facing. And then the Broadcast Incorporated was the way that we planted. It was a little bit different. We used the equipment that they had at the farm. But one thing that you notice here is the yield at farm one. Notice these Bs, that means they're not statistically different. So none of these were statistically different, the drill and the Broadcast, excuse me, Incorporated were all the same. Look at farm two down here, look at the Bs right here. Not statistically different, drill, Broadcast Incorporated. Come up over here. None of are significantly different up here. These are all As so, and in this location, we actually planted three different populations. We tried to keep the populations the same at the other locations between the drill and the Broadcast Incorporated. But here we're like, let's add some population stuff in here to see, maybe we need to plant more seeds, if we're gonna Broadcast Incorporate it. Well in our first year, no difference between 'em at all, which was a little bit of a surprise. Farm four, same thing. The Broadcast Incorporated and the drill, there was a little bit of statistical difference here, but not a lot. Here, we had two different populations, 1.4 and 1.8 million seeds with the drill and the same with Broadcast Incorporated. And then farm five, we had a drill on 4.85 inch row spacing, and then Salford. And there was no statistical difference between those yields as well. So on this, a few other trials that we had going on, we did a seeding depth study. One of the things that we were noticing is that, that planting depth is pretty important. And uniformity of planting depth was important, but we weren't really testing, you know, what is the right planting depth? So this is one year of data. This trial is planted for a second year. So I just need to, you know, give you the caveat. This is from one year of data. So we can't really make recommendations. We really need three seasons to really draw some conclusions. So we planted 1/2, 1 1/2, 2 1/2, and three inches deep. Here's the resulting yields. Here's your statistical separations. The highest yield was 111 that occurred at 1.5 inches deep. Now we planted three different varieties. And the reason that we did that is we thought if we're gonna plant at these deeper depths, it's 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 inch, when we plant varieties, that tend to be short, most of them have a dwarfing gene, this Rht-1 or Rht-2. If they have this dwarfing gene, that means the coleoptile length is shorter. So if we're gonna plant these varieties that have the shorter coleoptile length, if we plant 'em at a deeper depth, are we gonna plant too deep and they can't emerge properly? So basically we were looking for the inner interaction between the dwarfing gene and the planting depth, which there was none. There was a difference in the varieties in terms of yield, and you can see those numbers here, but we really didn't see that difference with this dwarfing gene in the coleoptile length. So another study that we had was a planting date by seeding rate study. And this has wheat in the foreground and the background, the lighter colored that's barley back there. We did basically the exact same study on barley that we did on wheat. So this pass would be the last planting date. This would be the fourth planting date. This pass would be the third planting date, second planting date, and the first planting date. And you can see, as you look at this pass compared to this one, compared to this one, you can see differences in the development of the crop. And then so within each pass, we also did different populations as well. So here's some data from the second year. We had planting dates beginning, mid, sorry, mid September going end of September, mid October, end of October. Mid-November and you can see the yield response, we had As at the beginning, the actual highest yield at 119 was at September 29th date. And then the yields drop off quickly as you get later in the season. In terms of population, we planted from 0.8 million seeds to the acre in 400,000 pound increments or 400,000 seed increments all the way up to 2.4. And you could see the yield did go up, as we planted more seed per acre. But look at your mean separations. You got A on all of these. That means that 1.2, all of the way down to 2.4 million seeds was not statistically different and the 1.2 yield at at 93.2, you're only gaining, what about 3.2 bushels by doubling the amount of seed per acre out there. I think this is an indication that we can back off on our populations, but we have more research to do here on this. You know, we only have two years of data so far, and we need to have more years than this. So this is about all I have time to conduct right now. So I would be happy to answer any questions that you have. My cell phone number. Sorry, my cell phone number is 269-832-0497. My email is pennin34@msu.edu. I'd be more than happy to talk to anybody. Contact me with any questions that you have. Thanks. And I wish you the best. Have a great day and have a safe planting season.