Bill Stangel 0:01
I assume, if you’re going to have wheat, it’d be milling.

Charlie Hammer 0:05
Yeah, yeah. You you go into it, it’s all food. And if it’s doesn’t make food grade, then it gets shunted off into feed, right,

Will Fulwider 0:15
Right, right. And I think that’s where people are like, well, if I’m only getting two and a half dollars per bushel of wheat. Why am I growing wheat? You know, type of thing

Bill Stangel 0:25
And what you know the other thing that happens in this equation when wheat is priced really low, the market’s telling us, okay, this is feed. It’s not food. That’s the other part of the equation that kind of gets lost.

Will Fulwider 0:49
Welcome to Field Notes. Today we are talking about wheat management, specifically how can we avoid getting docked to the elevator? How can we make sure that we’re making having the best bang for our buck when we’re planting this crop of wheat, especially in a year like this, when we are operating in pretty low margin territory. To talk about it. Today we have Charlie Hammer, a farmer near Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, and Bill Stangel of Soil Crop Solutions. That’s not what it is. Crop Soil Solutions.

Bill Stangel 1:17
Soil Solutions Consulting.

Will Fulwider 1:19
Cool. There we go. Bill Stangel of soil solutions consulting, thanks for coming on today. Excited to talk with you all aboutwheat. Charlie, can you start us off and talk a little bit about your farm?

Charlie Hammer 1:32
Well, we’re some diversified here, between corn, soybeans and wheat. We we put wheat into the rotation, I’d have to say, back probably about 10-12, years ago, and maybe not to the extent we’ve had the last four years or so, but we’ll end up planting approximately 250, to 400 acres of wheat behind soybeans, and a lot of that acreage will dictate by how fast you get the soybeans off and wheat planted in fall. Now, Bill’s got some statistics here about planting wheat. And I think Shawn Conley also has that about getting your wheat planted early, potentially before that October 1 date, even there’s good data to show that it should be planted as soon as you can. And so we’ll end up with the 250 to 400 acres of wheat, and then about 650 of soybeans, and then about 650 to 700 of corn, and our wheat has always followed soybeans.

Great. Thanks. Bill, can you talk a little bit about your business and how you work with wheat?

Bill Stangel 3:08
Well, I’ve been doing the independent crop consulting gig for this will be 40 years this year, and I’ve been working in South Central Wisconsin. Actually started out in Illinois for a couple years, and then moved back to Wisconsin, and have been working with typical agricultural operations throughout the South Central Wisconsin started out primarily with dairy farms and a mix of crop cash grain farms. And right now I’m working primarily with cash grain farms. Don’t have any dairy operations any longer, and narrowed my practice down quite a bit, but I do work with some livestock operations yet, heifer raising and beef raising operations, but the focus of my service is to bring a level of management to the table that relies heavily on the scientific information that we’ve got out there that we can apply to the field with a high degree of certainty or probability of getting the right response, and then bringing a few years of experience into the equation as well, to kind of fill some of the gaps in and so with the objective to just raise the level of management that we have going into those acres that we walk across.

Will Fulwider 4:53
Great. And Charlie, you mentioned that you grow quite a bit of wheat compared to a lot of farmers who maybe have. 40 acre here, or even less, if they’re doing if they’re throwing wheat into the rotation. And so can you talk a little bit about how when you’re managing this week, how you go about making grade, so to speak, you know, thinking about when you go to the elevator, making sure that you’re getting that top price, that you’re not getting docked because of DON levels, or because of kernel size, or what test weight, what have you? Can you talk a little bit about that process?

Charlie Hammer 5:27
It starts out as management of the wheat, first of all, the potential for dockage on vomitoxin and some of those other issues definitely, is before harvest is to and then in the growing season is to monitor that and apply fungicides or to leave, you know, mitigate some of the problems you could have with you know it depends upon your growing season. If it’s hot and dry, well then it’s not as big an issue as if it’s wet and cool. And so you would have to start there, and then you might have to look at depending upon your acreage and and how you would handle it. You should have the ability, possibly, to run it through a grain dryer, or I call it grain conditioning, and harvest at a higher moisture, and run it through a dryer and preserve the test weight and the quality. That way, the big difference so and it you cannot treat that crop as just say, you know, if you’re going to raise it as a cash crop, you don’t treat it as a is a minor crop. You treat it as a enterprise or a source of revenue that you’d want to monitor it real closely, same as a grain corn or soybean crop.

Bill Stangel 7:10
Yeah, I think what Charlie brought up, you know, we kind of work as a team on on how this crop comes together for us. You know, Charlie hit the nail on the head with stating, This is not it can’t play second fiddle to the other crops in the system. We have multiple reasons for having wheat in the rotation to start with, and one of the fundamental reasons we start with we have wheat in in the rotation is we see the benefit it gives us to the other crops in the rotation, the beans have definitely, definitely take advantage of having one more year away from being beans in The rotation. Corn can do pretty good in a corn bean rotation, but, or my observation, has been some of our best corn has been following wheat in in this system, but we start out yield objectives that are considerably higher than what our state averages are, you know, we’re missing the boat on many acres in the state with low expectations. You know, we walk into this with the objective we’re working in that 120 bushel is our target, and we’re striving for more than that. And with that, as with any other crop, we have to have the table set so that we have adequate fertility in terms of soil test levels, adequate fertility in terms of feeding the crop as it’s needed, Pre plant or early spring, and then managing nitrogen as the crop develops and and tweak it for the season that we’re dealing with. So when it comes to disease management, we’re all specifically focused in on our leaf diseases, stem diseases, and in some cases, we have some soil borne diseases that crop up now and that now and again that we have to manage. But the big marketing hurdle is always to fusairum head blight, scab and we can reduce its impact with management fungicides, we can’t eliminate it. We can only reduce it. And I guess the approach that I tried to implement is we want to have the table set so that we are managing every opportunity that we’re presented with to. To be in the best position as we get into that grain fill period that we can finish the crop off strong and keep it alive for as long as possible.

Will Fulwider 10:12
Great. And for you know, we’ve both of you talked about fusarium, and I think that is, from a management perspective, probably the most limiting aspect of maybe, you know, making grade, of getting that that kind of more premium at the elevator, and is that in every year you’re gonna go out, no matter what type of situation and spray a fungicide, or is that kind of based on the condition, as Charlie said, if it’s hot and dry, it’s maybe not as necessary.

Bill Stangel 10:41
You know, in my experience, we have multiple benefits to the fungicide. And one component we haven’t mentioned up to this point is straw. You know, it’s in this operation. Straw is a significant portion of the revenue stream and in margin. And finally, these data and other data that I’ve been seeing in recent years. You know, if, if you are marketing straw, it’s a no brainer. You know, regardless of what you’re doing for fusarium head blight, you know that, and that becomes disease management in general. When we’re talking about fusarium, you know that’s specific chemistry and specific timing. But disease management in general, if you’ve got disease and you’re marketing straw there, you’re going to take a yield hit if you’re not, if you are not treating for disease in wheat, plain and simple, at least in our environment, there are very few years I can’t say I’ve seen a year where I would say, Oh, we don’t need fungicide period. Well, that might be true for fusarium, and there have been seasons where we have not treated specifically for fusarium, but those that are very rare in our environment, but every year, you will see the effects of disease on straw yield, and at least that’s my observation, and Conley’s data supports that.

Charlie Hammer 12:21
And I’d have to agree with Bill a little bit. It was a little bit. Maybe we were a little bit light on that of commenting on it, but every year you need to take a look at it. And 99% treated okay? Just because Bill pointed out with the the quality there.

Will Fulwider 12:45
Right? Because you’re not, it’s not just the grain, it’s also the straw, and that’s it. And for you, for wheat, that’s a big component of, you know, your total revenue source,

Bill Stangel 12:55
Absolutely right? You know. And my, my attitude on that has evolved quite a bit in recent years and and apparently, because, you know, we didn’t have data on the on the straw side of it, it just wasn’t part of our lexicon. But, you know, the the evidence supports it. I don’t have in field data where we’ve tested straw yields, but I can say observationally, you see the deterioration in straw, where we have check strips out there and things like that. It’s pretty obvious pretty quickly, and you get into a year where you have high leaf disease pressure outside of fusarium or even stem rust. In some years, you see it in standability and things like that. Once you start seeing broken stalks in the field, it’s really tough to maintain straw yields with that happening,

Will Fulwider 13:55
Gotcha. Gotcha. So you all have been involved in this intensive wheat management project for a couple years now. I’ve gone out there and with a Gandy wheel and measured some fields for the project as well. And I’m just curious if you’ve could share a little bit about what you’ve learned from being a part of that project, from your own management in those plots and or from other farms that are taking part in kind of what the larger takeaways of it are so far?

Bill Stangel 14:27
Well, I’ll start it out I came across this project. It’s called the yield enhancement network, being offered by Michigan State University and Guelph university in Ontario. And it’s a project, an observational study, where we’re simply identifying an area within a field, collecting data on. It from when, when we break dormancy, right up through harvest, and we’re just collecting observational metrics like tissue analysis, couple plant analysis samples during the season, a grain sample that is analyzed for milling characteristics and various quality parameters. Stand density, straw yields, just a whole list of observations, and then that data is compiled, and we’re able to get, we get a report every season to say, here’s here’s your data for your site, and here’s how it compares to the rest of the farms that are in the system. And we’ve been doing it. We’re into our fourth season of doing it right now. Last year, I think there was just a hair under 200 participants in it. I think when we started, and three years ago, it was, there was under 100 at that time. And from my perspective, it’s given us a lot of good fundamental, basic information on the mechanics of yield, and then also gleaned information in the various meetings and discussions we’ve had with the group as to what the what people are seeing and what they’re doing to lead the group and in their yields, we’ve had good yields, nothing to win the yield contest or anything like that, but learned a lot about where the potential lies and where we might want to change our management to match the practices of the people who are yielding higher than what we’re doing and take it from there.

Will Fulwider 17:06
Gotcha, Charlie, is there anything that you’ve kind of taken away from the project and applied on the farm?

Charlie Hammer 17:14
Well, we’ve taken away some of the bullet points of production. You know that it makes, makes you want to think, or makes you aware of why, where we’re at, and where where we came from, there’s in production, you know? It gives us an idea, especially has as we’re benchmarking this. And so we’ll get data back. It shows where we fit in with the group and and what we’re doing correct and what we’re probably not doing to obtain these high yields.

Bill Stangel 17:57
One thing that Charlie mentioned earlier, which is which comes right out of our data and the observations we’ve seen from the group. Our planting date, you know, we’re, we’re stuck in this mode of, oh yeah, we, we, we’re going to plant October 1, October 10, because that’s when we can because our soybeans are harvested and we’re, we’re jumping on it quickly. Well, in the fall of 23 we’re looking at the data. Say, you know, if we got another seven days earlier on planting dates, we’d be more in line with what the people who are leading yields on this project. Let’s, what can we do to improve that differential? And we went from a typically planting a group 2 soybean down to a 1.4. We were able to find very, very good yielding group, point 1.4 and pulled those beans off, and we were planting September 25 this last fall. So it was the earliest planting that we’ve had in many, many years, and that’s the deliberate effort that we had out of the information that we got from this project.

Will Fulwider 19:21
Cool, yeah. And then at that point, it’s like this calculus of How Low Can I drop with my maturity groups with the soybeans, and not shave off too much yield to give room for that wheat to then, but bust out a lot more yield in the end.That’s interesting. Yeah.

Bill Stangel 19:39
Exactly.

Charlie Hammer 19:40
And Conley’s got some good data on the planting of soybeans in order to achieve a earlier plant harvest. Also he’s come up with some pretty good data to support early planting soybeans and the different for. Uh, maturities, and how they reflect on the yield at planting.

Bill Stangel 20:06
Yeah, and, and I think Charlie’s bringing up a good point. You know, it’s the system. You know, we’re talking about wheat here, but we’re, we’ve, we’ve shifted our soybean establishment strategy. We are planting soybeans before corn, whereas historically, it was just the opposite corn first, then we plant soybeans. Well, you know, we’ve broken out of that rut, and it’s opened the door for us to improve the management of the wheat because of that shift in management on our soybean crop.

Will Fulwider 20:43
Yeah, it’s all the system. Can’t think of it in isolation by any means, right? And Charlie I shifting gears a little bit. I remember we had a conversation a bit ago that you had one year you had decided to move, or at least try out a a not soft, red winter wheat, which is by far the most commonly planted in Wisconsin. You tried a different type of different variety of wheat and had a contract for it, or something along those lines. And I’m just curious what your experience was with this different type of wheat. Did it go well? Is it something you’re never going to ever do again? If you if you could chat a little bit about

Charlie Hammer 21:23
that. Well, I guess what brought us made us aware of that this, this variety, or this, I don’t even call it, between red wheat and soft wheat, has been growing somewhat successfully up here in the past, I’m going back into probably the 90s, when the Didion grain elevator, which was in Johnsons Creek, promoted this product, or this this variety, and It was growing very competitively with soft red, and the characteristics are pretty much the same, although it might be a tad bit less winter hardy. I don’t know that we get the feeling that it has that. One of the drawbacks would be that, but it can go into the soft red market. We We understand from Michigan. Michigan is a big state that grows a lot of it, okay, and so, like I said back in the 90s, Didion was successful at it. The issue you had with growers was that it has a tendency to sprout in the head a little quicker than your average variety of soft red so as most producers that would grow that will tend to and most producers, even, as I mentioned earlier about conditioning, I call it grain conditioning, but grain drying, if you wait till you’re you don’t get docked on moisture. I think it’s 13.5 is your docker you like to beat under 13, well, 13 or less, and you might get a dock at 14, but then it starts ratcheting up. But if you can dry it, you can take that wheat off at 15 to 18, and that kind of minimizes your potential for having a sprout damage, okay, and that wheat tends to when you get conditions out here in the field where rainfall is quite frequently in the summer, it could be a a time frame where you get rain every every third day wouldn’t have to be heavy, but some so that that’s what kind of took the edge off of growing it 15-20, years ago. And so if you’re going to do it, you’d want to be able to harvest earlier and condition that grain to for storage.

Will Fulwider 24:16
Gotcha. And this is soft white, right?

Charlie Hammer 24:18
Soft white wheat, yes.

Will Fulwider 24:20
Gotcha. And from a and you know, other than the pre harvest sprouting, is it more susceptible to fusarium, or is it managed pretty similar to the soft reds?

Charlie Hammer 24:29
Bill can chime in, but it’s management. As far as fungicides, herbicides, your fertilizer fertilization is is pretty close to what the soft red is>

Bill Stangel 24:44
yeah, what what we have when dealing with soft white wheat as a class? I don’t know if you could say it’s any better or worse than soft red. Um. Uh, but it’s, it boils down to more of a varietal difference. So you need to know what’s vulnerabilities and the the soft white we, we grew last year, is one that’s done quite well in Michigan over the years, but it was more vulnerable to number of diseases than soft reds that we were are growing typically here. But I wouldn’t attribute that to the class as much as I would, it’s just, it’s just a varietal difference. So it’s a very good yielding variety. And when you have, I would look at it same way. If we had a very good yielding red, soft red, that required a higher level of management, but it yielded and delivered. If you managed it, we’re going to, we’re going to give it a whirl to see if we’re up to the task. And that’s how this one shook out this year for us too. It was interesting to see it. It was, it was a very it had some unique characteristics in the field that I thought were really advantageous. You know, physiologically, one thing that stood out with this variety for us, our uniformity in head size or head height was wonderful. It was. I hadn’t, I haven’t seen that uniform plant height and head height very often through my years of doing this, and you know, it exposed us to some new genetics and materials out of Europe that I hadn’t seen. And you know, it’s like, Hey, this is, this is interesting stuff. And it yielded very, very well. It was, it was right up there with everything else that we were producing. So.

Will Fulwider 27:04
Gotcha. And you were able, was it, were you able to get a premium on the on the price for that wheat, or was it just to try it out? More so.

Charlie Hammer 27:13
More, let’s try it out. So we’ve had in the past. It’s been probably 10 years since we’ve had some prior and that went into the pharmaceutical market, and which is very finicky as far as quality and what you’re working

Bill Stangel 27:35
You know, and in in general, for white, there is a premium over red. The challenge becomes, how far is? How far do you have to go to get that premium? You know, it’s, it’s the potentials there, the opportunity may, may come back again. You know, it’s a matter of going out and finding where these opportunities lie, and see if we can deliver what they’re looking for and put it on a truck and not have that eat up all of that premium. That’s really what we’re trying to achieve in this equation.

Will Fulwider 28:19
Right? Makes total sense. So I just kind of want to wrap things up by asking you both, I guess, where do you see wheat production in Wisconsin heading? Do you think, do you imagine in the future, in the near future, that you’ll see more acres of wheat in the state, more intensely managed, like you all have been doing, aiming for higher yields? Or where are we headed?

Charlie Hammer 28:42
My opinion is it’s the market is really saying, hey, we got a lot of wheat here. And right now, I think it is. Numbers are going to be down eventually. I mean, you know, it’s just, it’s, it depends upon the level of management you want to put at it okay? You know, if you want to get this in and you want to have soil, you know if you want to work with your soils and and work within do cover crops and emphasis on on on soil, somewhat you’ll probably would channel some acreage into the wheat as a rotation. Then again, if you’re just going to plant it, put some fertilizer on it, maybe a fungicide, and walk away and come back July 1 say, Oh, we’re going to combine wheat, you might be missing out on it quite a bit. So it depends upon the level of management people want to put into it.

Bill Stangel 29:50
I think, from my perspective, what Charlie brought up one aspect we didn’t discuss at all, and this is what we’re able to do with cover crops. Following that wheat. Crop, we’ve been able to capitalize that on that and maximize it with using legumes or various mixes to push biomass and just really do a bang up job with cover crop production following wheat. I’m of the opinion there is tremendous opportunity for wheat moving forward, the market’s always going to be fickle, and the question is, are we going to position ourselves to capitalize on those windows of opportunity where the market says, hey, we’re going to pay you for wheat. You got to be ready to play when that opportunity arises. And I look at where we are in Wisconsin, with average wheat yields, and look around and how that compares to other states and provinces, we have room for up for improvement. There’s no question about it. Kentucky made a deliberate effort, starting back in the 90s, to change the trajectory of their wheat production, and there was a concerted effort by some, some in the private sector and the University of Kentucky to really go after it and put together systems that are consistent with what we know improves yield, and they have had tremendous statewide yield average increases. We jump over to Ontario, their wheat yields across the province, in our in you know, we’re talking a province that plants about a million acres of wheat every year. This past year, 24 they were just under 100 bushel per acre for province wide average, and they’re consistently, you know, in the high 80s and in the 90s on a on an average. So, you know, I look at that and say, Hey, we’ve got room for up, room for improvement within this state. We have the climate to produce it. And then we look at the beneficial aspects of it from a rotational standpoint, you know, the profitability of a three year rotation with high yielding wheat. It’s increasingly difficult to do the same profitability with a corn soybean rotation. So with that, I think, you know, as commodity prices drop, returns to management have to be focused on and, and I think wheat fits in real well to that long term perspective, and, and we’ve got room for improvement here to make wheat more profitable just by adding yield.

Will Fulwider 33:02
Great. Well, Charlie and Bill, really appreciate your time today and chatting with us

Bill Stangel 33:09
All right.

Charlie Hammer 33:09
When does this air?

Will Fulwider 33:17
Thanks for listening. This has been Field Notes from UW Madison extension. My name is Will Fulwider regional crops educator for dane and dodge counties. A big thank you to Joe Ryan for creating our theme music and to Abby Wilkymaky for our logo. If you have any questions about anything you’ve heard today or about your farming practices in general, reach out to the extension agriculture educators serving your region.