We grow a little of cereal rye for cover crop seed. It’s kind of like winter wheat, you plant it in the fall at the same time you’re planting wheat. But it comes ripe about 3 weeks after the winter wheat.
We harvested the rye last week.
It looks like wheat in this picture. It’s actually about 2 feet taller than wheat and has a bigger head with bigger grains.
Rye going into the combine.
This year we tried a couple of ‘high-management’ test strips in the rye. We use high-management practices on wheat; we spray for weeds as needed, spoon feed it nitrogen 3 or 4 or 5 different times, and apply fungicides at the precise times diseases are a threat.
It’s a lot a messing around, often when we’re trying to get other things done, but it’s the difference between 60 bushels per acre and 100 bushels per acre in wheat for us.
So we thought we’d try those same practices in rye this year. The main part of the rye field, where we just hit it with one pass of fertilizer and fungicide went 55 bushels to the acre. The high management part…
… went as high as 110 bushels to the acre and averaged about 95 bushels to the acre.
Like so many things, attention to the details matters.
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