You thought planting was done? Well it is, but we may be seen swooping in a field or two for replant.
What am I doing out here with the planter in the middle of an established soybean crop?
What is Replant?
Around here replant is usually the result of crops being drowned out by heavy rainfall that accumulates in low lying areas of a field. Replanting is not an uncommon task, but it’s not something you want to do. Planting a crop twice to get one crop is not the cheapest way to farm. So far we’ve only replanted maybe 2 acres of soybeans across several spots in one field right next to the shop. Not very much at all, but every little bit helps. When you have a yield monitor in the combine cab it becomes quite obvious that it takes many of acres of great yield to compensate for just a little bit of 0 yield. Since the planter still had a splash of soybean seed in it from planting 1.0 it wasn’t much trouble to run out and hit these spots. Had they been farther from home we might have just left them alone.
How Do We Know When to Replant?
This time around we more or less replanted here at the home farm because it was easy to do and took just minutes from the tractor pulling out of the shed until I backed it in again. But if you have a borderline replant decision to make there are plenty of decision making tools out there. I often look to Purdue on these matters because that’s where I went to school, it’s the ag college in Indiana, and being located very near to our farm the data is often quite relevant to us.
Purdue has this to say about replanting soybeans.
The first step all growers should take before making any replant decision is to identify what caused the poor stand. Did the seed fail to germinate or did it germinate, then die? What caused poor emergence? Cool, wet soil? Poor seed quality? Inaccurate planter calibration? Seeding too deep or too shallow? Soil crusting? Herbicide injury? Insect feeding? Disease? Identifying the cause is important because if conditions have not changed, then replanting will simply repeat the problem.
This is one regular wet spot that got a replant. This spot has been so wet the cover crop rye and some weeds never got sprayed ahead of planting. You can see they are doing just fine!
As we are already halfway through June it’s not likely we’ll be out replanting much if anything else. We don’t have any other spots worth replanting right now, and as the season progresses you have to think about how much good crop you are going to trample getting to the bad areas.
Last year because of the drought all but one of our wettest wet holes on the entire farm had a crop. In fact all the wet holes had a stellar crop in them because they were they only soils that had any significant amount of water in them. 2013 is much more normal for this part of the country although planting was a little bit behind schedule. However I don’t hear many complaints about rain following the big drought last year.
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I doubt many up-river are complaining about the rains. But down south it’s something else again. I’ll even complain about the rain you got this week that we didn’t! My Wabash River farm has gone back under water now that we’re getting hit by the third major pulse of flooding this spring. If we do not get it planted that will be the third time out of the last four years. The only year we did get it planted being the drought which nearly halved production.
Having to replant would be a luxury. I’d just like to be able to get our bottomlands planted.