Looking for High Yield Soybeans

For the first time, Walter Godwin will plant soybeans under irrigation -- which isn’t a typical practice for a Georgia farmer to do -- because getting a higher soybean yield is his best bet for solid cash flow in 2015.

During an interview with South East Farm Press Godwin pointed out his choice of soybeans to lead the way on his farm is unusual considering he farms in Mitchell and Grady counties in Georgia, one of the largest peanut-producing regions in the country. His particular pocket of land has heavy soils, though, which are good for making a good peanut crop but not good for digging and harvesting the peanuts. The soil hangs on to the pods too tight.

For Godwin, 2015 is the year to go for higher-yielding soybeans. Cotton prices threaten barely to stay in the 60-cent-per-pound range; contracts for peanuts, due to a market glut, have been low to nonexistent, and, besides, he can’t get the yields in the wagons needed to make peanuts cash flow anyway. Corn and wheat prices are down.

Pretty enough

So that leaves soybean at around $9 to $9.50 per bushel, the most-attractive option; not pretty, but pretty enough for him and his best option for finance in 2015. But he needs the yields from the soybeans to make it work.

He’s hoping to average as near to 75 bushels per acre as he can get with his 500 acres of soybeans. He plans 300 of those acres under to be under irrigation, and the pivots where being put in as he attended the Feb. 5 Georgia/Florida Soybean/Small Grain Expo.

Godwin is the current president of the Georgia/Florida Soybean Association, so he is no stranger to soybeans, but his beans have always been dryland. And he has done well at times with dryland, averaging 50 bushels or better per acre in some fields.

Drought conditions and 100-deree weather hit his part of Georgia in June and July of last year, right at soybean blooming time, and dropped Godwin’s earlier planted soybean yields to the 10- to 15-bushel range.

He’ll plant about four different soybean varieties, going in the ground starting mid-April and work them in through May. The varieties will be full-season determinates but he is going to try again an indeterminate variety, which put on the pods last year but didn’t make because of the drought. But under irrigation, he thinks the indeterminate will produce what he needs.

Obtainable yields

He will take care of the beans to secure the yields, he said, which means he will spend to apply N through the irrigation systems as needed and keep insect and disease pressure down with spray trips across the field. But it inputs will be as minimal as possible without sacrificing yield potential.

Many growers balk at spending much money on a soybean crop. They get 40 bushels per acre or so and they’re happy. That’s fine. But by doing a few things differently like Godwin -- and nothing really too flashy or spending much more -- they can hit 60- or 70-bushel averages and be profitable.

When prices for soybeans reached $15 per bushel and higher a few years back, Southeast growers looked closer at getting more bushels out of their beans, said Jared Whitaker, University of Georgia Extension agronomist, and some growers started seeing soybeans in a different light, a crop worth investing in for higher profits.

“When we’re talking about $5 (per bushel) beans, I can see not wanting to put much if anything in the crop. I get that. But when we were talking higher prices and even now with close to $10 soybeans, like where we are right now, we’re still talking being profitable with higher yields,” Whitaker said.

Save Billions of Gallons of Water

Farmers who use polytubing for irrigation often don’t get the most efficient use of their water resources, says Chris DeClerk, irrigation specialist with Delta Plastics, Little Rock, Ark., who spoke at the annual meeting of the Mississippi Agricultural Consultants Association which was covered by Delta Farm Press.

For more information, watch the video here.

Pumping Lowering Water Levels

Thanks to a severe, multiyear drought and increased demand for water, groundwater levels in the Upper Rio Grande Basin in Colorado, New Mexico and Far West Texas have dropped as much as 200 feet through the years.

A water expert at New Mexico State University (NMSU) warns those levels are just the tip of the iceberg as a sluggish recharge of the river, combined with increased groundwater pumping in the years ahead, will create worse shortages in the near future.

Brian Hurd, an agricultural economics professor and president of the Universities Council on Water Resources was quoted recently in the El Paso Times, saying that the threat of coming water shortages in New Mexico and Texas represents a serious problem for farmers up and down the entire basin region.

"The real big deal is going to be the change in the intensity of pumping," Hurd told the Times (http://bit.ly/1ricO5E).

Hurd and government hydrologists agree that river flows in the Rio Grande will suffer more as the demand for groundwater increases as a result of growing population density and the need for more water for agricultural and industrial activities.

In a 2013 joint Upper Rio Grande Impact Assessment prepared by the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and the Sandia Laboratory Climate Security Program, even at the current annual use of groundwater throughout the Basin, critical water shortages will intensify in the years ahead.

According to that assessment, in the Upper Rio Grande Basin of Colorado and New Mexico, water management challenges posed by a highly variable and extremely limited water supply have been exacerbated by a prolonged drought.

In addition to problems associated with heavy groundwater pumping, the assessment determined that pronounced changes in climate in future years are anticipated for the Upper Rio Grande. The climate modeling used to support the study suggested that average temperatures in the Upper Rio Grande Basin may rise by an additional 4 degrees to 6 degrees F by the end of the 21st century.

Simulations

These model simulations do not consistently project changes in annual average precipitation in this basin, but they do project changes to the magnitude, timing, and variability of inflows to the system. In addition to groundwater demand, the study detailed the following:

• Decreases in overall water availability

Supplies of all native sources to the Rio Grande are projected to decrease on average by about one third, while flows in the tributaries that supply the imported water of the San Juan-Chama Project are projected to decrease on average by about one fourth.

• Changes in the timing of flows

The seasonality of flows is projected to change. Anticipated changes include earlier snowmelt runoffs as well as increased variability in the magnitude, timing, and spatial distribution of streamflow and other hydrologic variables. Projections indicate that this basin will experience a decrease in summertime flows and less of a decrease (or potentially even an increase) in wintertime flows.

• Increases in the variability of flows

All simulations used in this study project an increase in the month-to-month and inter-annual variability of flows over the course of the century. The frequency, intensity, and duration of both droughts and floods are projected to increase.

While climate change will increase the risks of water shortage in the basin area, of more immediate concern is how communities and industry will react to current shortages. While recent drought conditions have lowered reservoir levels and decreased inflows to lakes, increased pumping of groundwater has helped to sustain adequate resources in the short term.

Challenges Ahead

But hydrologists say the time for such groundwater relief may be short lived as demand increases and groundwater levels continue to drop.

Zhuping Sheng, a hydrologist at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center in El Paso, draws a comparison with putting money in the bank.

"We're withdrawing more than we are depositing," he says.

He points out that in some areas around El Paso, for example, groundwater levels have dropped by as much as 200 feet over the last century.

Hydrologists say as groundwater continues to diminish as a result of slower recharge and greater use, population levels along the basin are expected to rise, adding a greater strain on the region's hydrology.

Adding to the overall problems are both the ongoing drought and lighter-than-normal snowpacks in the San Juan mountains in recent years. Water experts say significant and beneficial rains over the last two summer and fall seasons have helped, but it was "like putting a Band-Aid on a major wound."

As farmers prepare for planting in 2015, concerns are elevated over whether there will be enough water to bring their crops to another successful harvest. Good rains in the second half of this year should provide enough water to get the crop started, but experts say another dry summer could be devastating if those rains don't continue late into the growing season.

8 Ways Cover Crops Pay

Think about the land you drive by that's idle and not being farmed.  What do you see?  Weeds usually.

"Mother Nature keeps the ground covered, and a living root in the soil, for nine to ten months out of the year.  Then we came along and started doing tillage to grow row crops.  By growing corn or soybeans, we keep a living plant on the soil surface just five months or so a year," says Paul Jasa, engineer in biological agriculture systems at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in a recent interview with Agriculture.com.

Why Plant Cover Crops?

Jasa, who studied cover crop and no-till systems for more than two decades, farmers need to understand why they want to grow cover crops.

There are numerous reasons:

1. Erosion control
2. Nutrient capture/recycle
3. Improved soil health
4. Water management
5. Biodiversity
6. Nitrogen fixation
7. Reduced compaction
8. Weed supression

New Tool in Irrigation

The Oklahoma Mesonet, a network of environmental monitoring stations, is offering farmers a new irrigation tool to get "the most from the water.  It helps determine 'which and how much,'" said Al Sutherland, Oklahoma State University Mesonet Agriculture Coordinator, in a recent interview with South West Farm Press.

"Often in hot, dry summers, farmers simply turn on irrigation systems and let them run,' Sutherland said.  "But with subsurface drip irrigation systems and in years with more rain, producers need to make decisions on when to irrigate."

The system uses multiple factors including soil type, temperature, humidity, wind speed and solar radiation to determine the evaporation rate.  An irrigation planner is also included to help farmers determine when and how much water to apply.

The Oklahoma Mesonet consists of 120 automated stations covering Oklahoma.  There is at least one Mesonet station in every Oklahoma county.

To view a video of the system, go to South West Farm Press.

Groundwater Decline More Complicated Than Irrigation

Ground water across Texas has declined over the last eight years.  Mostly due to irrigation in agriculture and population growth.  However, a Texas A&M AgriLife Research study has identified other factors having an impact.

Groundwater decline has been the most server in the last four decades.  But not all the news is bad according to Dr. Srinivasulu Ale, AgriLife Research geospatial hydrology assistant professor in Vernon.

In a recent interview with South West Farm Press, Dr. Ale, who help write the book "Long-term (1930-2010) trends in groundwater levels in Texas: Influences of soils, land cover and water use," along with Dr. Sriroop Chaudhuri, said they conducted the study because by 2060 the states population is expected to double.  This will increase the demand for water at a time when water supply is expected to be reduced by 10%.

"We wanted to know which areas are more vulnerable to water shortages," he said.  "In order to plan and implement strategies to deal with the water level declines, we needed to know how these levels were declining spatially and temporally."

Waiting for Proper Time to Irrigate

With seemingly abundant water supplies in the five Delta states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee, many can't understand why anyone would ever have to irrigate.  Crop histories show that at some point in every season irrigation would pay dividends in the five state area.

Recently Jason Krutz, irrigation specialist with Mississippi State University, took an ag editor from Delta Farm Press on a tour to educate about water issues facing the Mississippi Delta.  He discussed how the use of flow meters, moisture sensors, and surge valves have helped farmers grow the same, and sometimes, more crops with less water.

Krutz and several members of the Mississippi Sustainable Water Resources Task Force stopped at a field operated by Tim Clements near Leleand, MS.  They demonstrated how the new technology could one day help farmers alter the current situation in which Delta farmers are removing more water from the alluvial aquifer than it is taking in.