Soybeans reaching the 100-bushel-per-acre level once was a pipedream, but field trials are aiming to make those yields a reality.
“There are a lot of management things that we can do in beans that we haven’t done a very good job of over the years. I think you as a grower, regardless of the variety, can get some gain just by maybe tweaking the way we manage soybeans a little bit,” said Scott Ebelhar, Beck’s Hybrid’s Southern Indiana Practical Farm Research director.
He shared some of the lessons learned in the 100-bushel soybean yield trials during the field day at Beck’s Central Illinois Practical Farm Research site
“We’ve had some good points of success in this trial, particularly in the south at the Fort Branch location (in Indiana) over the years. We’re pushing yields well into the mid-90s and doing that pretty consistently year in and year out,” he said.
The CIPFR site has yet to achieve the 100-bushel level, but yields consistently are increasing each year.
Ebelhar said the central Illinois trial yielded 74.1 bushels in 2008, 77.5 in 2009 and 82.9 in 2010 and reached 83.1 bushels in 2011, when planting was delayed and there was hot, dry weather late in the growing season. Ten of the 16 entries broke the 80-bushel level in 2011.
“That’s the kind of consistently that we’re looking for with these management practices. Maybe not so much that we’re hitting the homerun, but we want every acre to give us that increased yield potential compared to what we had in the past,” Ebelhar said.
“If we learned any one thing, there’s certainly not a silver bullet when it comes to raising high yield soybeans or corn. We think it’s a lot of the little things that we’ve got to make sure we do right.
“We have to set the potential. That way, if Mother Nature cooperates and we catch those late-season rains, we can take advantage of that, get that late-season growth and really try to maximize that yield potential year in and year out.”
The trials include various seed treatments, including Invinsa, a product that aids in reducing ethylene.
“It’s a stress management product. The concept is if we can reduce the amount of ethylene that’s produced by the plant, we kind of reduce that stress trigger and kind of trick that plant into continuing to grow even under stressful conditions,” Ebelhar said.
Variety selection, planting date, seed treatments and soil nutrient management should be among the main focuses in trying to reach triple-digit yields.
“When we look at some of the soil-borne diseases that we deal with in soybeans such as sudden death syndrome or late season diseases like white mold, we want to select varieties that have a good tolerance to those diseases. That’s going to help keep that yield potential high,” the researcher said.
“We also want varieties to give us aggressive vegetative growth. There’s that fine line between getting just the right amount of vegetative growth and those beans going down.
“It changes from year to year, but we like vegetative growth because ultimately it gives us more nodes, and that’s going to equate to more flowers, more pods, more beans and, ultimately, more yield.
“We want those rows closed by R2. When we’re at full flower, we want that little photosynthetic factor pumping at full force. We want to harvest as much sunlight as possible and convert that into seed. If we don’t have the rows closed, we’re giving up potential.”
Ebelhar noted one of the main boosts in increasing yields in the SIPFR trials has been early planting.
“I know growing up you just didn’t plant a soybean until all the corn was in the ground. You probably didn’t have the manpower, you were working all of the ground, you might even get SDS on those soybeans even,” he said.
“It just wasn’t a thing you took a chance on. That ground had to be warm, and those beans had to fly out of the ground.
“We look at that a little different these days, and the main reason is that by planting early, we stretch that vegetative growth window. We’re getting that much more growth, more nodes and, again, more flowers, more pods more beans and, ultimately, more yield.
“If I’m really shooting for maximum top-end yield, I’m going to take the fullest season maturity I think I can handle in that area without it getting frosted. I’m going to plant it that much earlier and am going to try to get as many nodes in that field as possible so I can get that many more clusters and that many more beans to harvest at the end of the year.”
He said most of the soybeans in the southern plots are in the 4.0 to 4.9 maturity range, and very few are shorter than a 3.6. There also has been some success in recent years with 2.9 in Kentucky.
“We plant them about April 15, about a week after the corn planters start rolling. We stretch that vegetative growth window, and we’re kind of making a 2.9 acting more like a 3.6,” Ebelhar said.
“It will still come out early, still catch that early harvest market in August, but we get that many more weeks of vegetative growth and that much more opportunity for yield at the end of the day.
“With early planting, there are obviously risks involved with that, and that’s why we have to focus on protecting that yield potential.”
A powerful tool to protect yield potential is through seed treatments, “and we do a very good job of that at Beck’s with an Escalate yield enhancement system,” the researcher said.
“When we plant early, we know there are risks involved with soil-borne diseases like pythium and rhizoctonia, and the fungicides that are included in that Escalate yield enhancement system does an excellent job of protecting against those early-season stresses.
“This year, in particular, we also saw benefits from the insecticide. We had quite a few bean leaf beetles feeding on beans very early this year.
“Escalate did a very good job of keeping those populations in check and helping to get those early-season beans off and continuing to be very vigorous.”
High yield trials also stress keeping weeds under control.
“A drought year reminds us why that is so important. We have a tendency in dry years to maybe let a few things go here and there,” Ebelhar said. “Grass and weed species are highly competitive for moisture with the soybean crop. We want to keep those in check. We want that moisture going to the beans not the weed.”
Foliar fungicides and insecticides also are applied to protect yield potential.
“We don’t see quite a consistent result here in the north because of the shorter growing season, but I tell my guys when we’re trying to make the decision whether or not to spray that and we hit that R2 to R3 window, if we’ve had a few rains that come in or we start getting that heavy dew in the morning where that canopy is wet every day, we’re more likely to see a profit from the use of those foliar fungicides,” Ebelhar said.
“When it’s dry and there is no moisture in the canopy, there really is no need to spend the money on those foliar fungicide products.”
In terms of nutrient management for soybeans, potash is a key component.
“We’ve had a tendency over the years to kind of treat beans like a stepchild crop. We tend to fertilizer all of our phosphate and potash in front of corn, and then we hope it’s still available another year or two down the road for our soybean crop,” Ebelhar said.
“In our higher organic matter soils, we do a pretty good job holding on to potash, but when we get into the low organic matter timber-type soils, we can throw a lot of potash out there, and we don’t have enough exchange sites to hold it all.
“Beans are a huge user of potash. I’m not shooting for 40-bushel beans anymore. I’m shooting for 70-bushel beans. That’s almost twice the amount of potash that we took off in a path when we look at it in terms of crop removal.
“We’ve had a lot of luck on our lower soils of applying potash every year instead of every two years in order to help feed that soybean crop that demands so much potash.”
