No sprays, no chemicals, none of it.
Curt John Forde of Facebook said this great crop planting tip on this post Cheryl Greenlee of FB made that I wanted to share with this article/link --
" nice looking grain here, and there is nothing 'magical' about organic weed control. Magical means the farmer wouldn't know what happened, if he didn't know why he had a weed free crop, .....how could he do it again? Weed free 'small grains' (oats, wheat, barley, etc) begins with fall tillage so the land is ready to plant the very FIRST day it is possible to drive on the fields and lightly till and plant the grain. Small grains germinate at lower soil temperatures and grow faster than the weeds shading them out and/or smothering the weeds. The best is when the early planted grains are hit with a late frost in April/early May that freezes and kills any broad leaf weeds and freezes off the oats causing it to tiller(stool) out from the roots with several stalks from the one seed. The result is a weed free field. If it doesn't freeze the early planted oats simply suppresses the weeds by competition. Grid planting of small grains creates intense competition of the oat plants at the point of intersection increasing growth rate (like a dense pine forest ) which outgrows the weeds. Row crops are easy to grow weed free using angular rotary hoeing or tine weeding and following up with cultivating using FLOW-SHIELDS° on the cultivator. Higher plant populations are beneficial for both weed control and increased yield in small grains, but our research is showing that higher corn and soybean populations , while increasing yields somewhat , the extra seed and fertilizer costs eat up the extra income. Our equa-distant corn trial plots the last two years indicate slightly less seed will give a farmer a much greater rate of return per dollar invested in crop expense for the year ."
No comments:
Post a Comment