Boring Pictures of Growing Wheat

The wheat came out of dormancy a couple of weeks ago. I usually also start agonizing and worrying about what sort of harvest I'm going to get about this time because you have to get enough rain to get it growing, but not too much rain, it has to rain at the right time to get a good grain fill, it has to stop raining before harvest,  there might be a late freeze that hammers the yield, etc. (they say that you have about 6 crop failures every year when you plant wheat).

So, I decided to start taking some pictures at different times between breaking dormancy and harvest so that I can compare how the wheat looks each year.  As a bonus, I can also start to show more of my little piece of the world to whoever happens to be reading this blog. 

I put some stakes out there as a landmark to make it easier to gauge the height of the wheat as it starts to grow. If you look close, or if I had been able to take a closer picture before the camera ran out of battery life, you might be able to see the orange strips I painted on the stakes (each strip is 6") to help measure the height.  

The first picture is looking across the field closest to the barn, it's not the best part of the field, but it's close and easy to take pictures from this spot.  I no-tilled this wheat into some crabgrass stubble in late October, and it was fertilized with about 90 lb. of nitrogen.

Wheat Field 23 March 2014

I first saw an article about pasture cropping about six years ago and started experimenting with the method a few years ago.  Pasture cropping is basically drilling cool season grain crops into warm season perennial grass stands to get the benefits of a grain harvest, grazing during the summer, and some regeneration or improvement of the pasture due to the two different sorts of crops complementing each other.   Typically, a pasture cropped field is fertilized the same as a conventional field, while also having some sort of herbicide applications to control weeds, etc.

No-kill cropping is a similar technique except there isn't any fertilizer or herbicide applied, the crop is just drilled into the pasture in hopes of more winter grazing possibilities or a grain harvest is all the stars somehow manage to line up.

 Anybody that's actually interested in pasture cropping or no-kill cropping would probably be better off going online to find more detailed information at a website like:  http://www.pasturecropping.com/


In my experimenting with pasture cropping, I've had mixed results, but I've never had a real failure. 

I drilled wheat in a number of places in pastures this fall to experiment a little more, and this picture is of a the weaning pen that is mostly Bermuda grass, it was grazed over the summer, mowed to control weeds (I'm not convinced that worked), then it had some weaned calves on it for a couple of weeks before I drilled the wheat.  It had no fertilizer or herbicide applied, so it might technically be more similar to no-kill cropping than pasture cropping.   

Weaning Pen 23 March 2014

It's hard to tell from the angle of the pictures, but at this point I've ended up with almost as good of a stand of wheat in the weaning pen as the fields with "normal" wheat.  If I can get a grain harvest from this pasture, my only expense will be about $10/acre for seed and the cost of fuel for the tractor.  Even a much lower grain yield than a conventional field could mean a higher profit, since my input costs are so low.

It's hard to describe to someone that doesn't grow wheat, but it's pretty exciting to me to think that there's a possibility that I could convert my cropland to perennial grass pasture and still plant and harvest a wheat crop from those fields.  I'm getting better results the more I experiment, so I'm hoping these pictures might help me figure out something I haven't figured out yet.


Since I'm having trouble with my camera, I going to include some pictures I took with my phone to see if the quality is good enough to ditch my camera and just use my phone for taking pictures.  Let me know what you think about the picture quality.

Wheat Field - 23 March 2014

Wheat Field - 23 March 2014

Weaning Pen - 23 March 2014

Weaning Pen - 23 March 2014