 Okay, can you guys hear me okay with this? Everything's good? Okay. Switching gears a little bit, but still staying with our grass crops. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you all today, and I appreciate your attention while we talk about wheat for a little while. The title was New Management Strategies, and I decided to do something with you guys that I've done with our growers in the Mid-Atlantic for the last year or two, which is challenging to think about something different. Instead of management strategies, let's think about an outcome, all right? The outcome is, what does it take to grow 150 bushels a week? Anybody in the room done this on three acres, okay? Well, I think the first time I ever gave this talk, they told me we have enough trouble growing 150-bushel corn a lot of the time. You might want to put this one in the box. But I wanted to share some experiences with you guys, and so more maybe than new ideas and management is sort of our program at Virginia Tech in the way we're pushing things into Mid-Atlantic and what we've learned in the last several years. I hope to leave time for a question or two when we get to the end. So who knows what the highest wheat yield in the world is? This is official yield challenge documentation. What is it? Ballpark, 150, 170, what do you think? Well, it was in New Zealand. It's 229 bushels to the acre. Now it's been several years ago, as you can tell by the fashion styles, probably even in New Zealand. But one of the funny things, I went back and when I pulled this together, one of the more interesting things I got about this was I was trying to understand what the grower and the consultant that you see here, what they speculated to be the reason for these, especially high yields in that environment, as opposed to maybe the UK or Europe where we tend to think of really high wheat yields. You know what they said? They said that they thought they got a much higher quality and intensity of solar radiation in that part of New Zealand because they were directly under the hole in the ozone layer. That's the truth. Take that for what it's worth. We've got some 200 bushel yields documented in North America, folks. It was in British Columbia and it was one of the first examples of a systems management approach that was taken for wheat and small grains in the Northern Hemisphere here. So they had four nitrogen timings. They had three different fungicide applications and they used plant growth regulators. So it's sort of the initiation of this modern intensive management program and obviously very effective in this particular environment. The over-encompassing graphic that's been around in the Virginia Tech intensive wheat management program for some time is this one with the idea that the concept here is pretty simple. If you take the number of heads per unit area, heads per acre, multiply that by the weight per kernel and time the kernels per head, so A times B times C, you get yield, right? I mean, conceptually, this is a very simple thing to solve. The problem is in the details though because when you push one up, something else tends to go down and vice versa. So it's a matter of the yield building factors and all these things add to yield potential in wheat. So it's variety selection, getting the right genetics. It's getting the fertility out there, especially the pre-plant fertility for us at RP and K needs to be done beforehand to have time to react, et cetera. So we've got to get that done and in place and then get in a good stand. Our work would mimic some of what others would tell you in that we're looking at 55 to 60 or so percent of our yield potential for a wheat crop being set when the drill leaves the field, okay? We've done our pre-plant fertility, we've planted it, we've chosen the genetics, and we've put a lot of things in place in terms of establishing that potential and that in some ways reflects the weight that those areas ought to receive when it comes time to focus of management decisions and for the decisions that you guys as consultants help the farmers that you work with make. And then of course, once we put all that into place, we can't lose it to weeds, insects, or diseases. We have some particular challenges in wheat and other small grains because of the issues with lodging. You can put about as much nitrogen on corn as you want with very little detrimental effects to the plants themselves. Small grains aren't that way. And then we're gonna talk just a second about harvest management if we do have time. So let's think about yield in terms of the sum of component parts, all right? Because I said A times B times C equals yield, right? So let's look at our 50 bushel yields here. Just an example of what might get us there, all right? If we have 40 heads per square foot, so at the end of the season, one square foot, you look down, you count all the heads there that are harvestable. You got 40, each one of those has 26 kernels on it and each one of those kernels, a thousand of those kernels weighs 32 grams. Those three things combined together, the product of those will give you 50 bushels to the acre. Make sense? Okay. We moved to 100 bushels. These aren't necessarily direct increases from one to the other. These are instances where I have observed this. So when we look at 100 bushel wheat, this is most commonly the way we're gonna get there in Virginia and in mid-Atlantic. So we're gonna go to 60 or more heads per square foot. We're gonna go to 30 or more grains per head and that seed size, that seed weight has to go up quite a lot. There are a couple of different scenarios here for 150 bushel wheat. Again, I'm gonna tell you that we don't do it on a regular basis. We occasionally have a yield contest entry that'll mail that, but that's rare for us. 120, 130 is pretty common. But we can do it this way. With 75, 30, 32 and 40, we can do it this way by bringing the number and the weight of the kernels down and increasing the number of heads. Now what I'd say is we have documented evidence that we can do this in terms of 36 grams per thousand seed. We can easily manage 75 heads per square foot and we can easily get to 31 grains per head. So why aren't we getting 150 bushel wheat? Because we don't usually get them all. You see how I put these three boxes in these three different places? We typically don't get them all at the same time. Don't get lost here, okay? We're not gonna spend much time on this and in fact I'm gonna go away from it directly. But I think we need to, we sort of talked about how the sum of the component parts needs to come together. And Dr. Heinegger alluded to this in corn. There are some physiological aspects in terms of crop improvement and management that we've gotta deal with when we think about these crops. Where our yield potential is equal to the amount of light that the plant can use or that it receives, how much it actually uses and then how much of it converts to grain, okay? And those of us that spend our time studying these crops as scientists and typically as, and also especially as plant breeders think about these sort of things a lot. But I think that what it means is, I think the take home message here is that when we start talking about all of these theoretical implications of impacts on yield, we've gotta keep in mind that all these things say that we assume that water and nutrients would not be limiting. Well that's not the world that most of us live in especially in terms of modern agricultural production, right? I mean we are dealing with questions of field specific parameters like soils. We're dealing with seed bed and whether or not there's tillage involved for tillage and liming, variety selection, all these things, right? And so that's where we're gonna spend the rest of our time with this talk is moving away from the theoretical into the practical and the work that we've done. I spend a lot of my time on variety testing, cultivar evaluation. Why do you think the state lets me do that? For one thing is I'm a tenured professor and they don't have a whole lot to say about it as long as I don't get too far out of line. But the other piece is that your counterparts in Virginia and in our region tell me that that's one of the most important things that I can be doing to help them be profitable wheat growers. As an example, I pulled some data from the North Carolina State official variety trials from a couple of years ago and I just did some real simple math on this but this is their statewide average. This is the highest yield they had. This is the average of the 75th percentile. This is the mean, the 25th percentile and so on. The consequences of being here versus here is 11 bushels to the acre. Now, I don't know about you guys and how much you pay attention to current ag media but I bet most of you have seen or heard of the guys that do the Ag PhD program, right? Well, one of the hefty brothers came to Virginia and I always, those of you that are on the faculty at Auburn can understand this, I always dread when we bring in experts from other parts of the country to Virginia because it usually takes me somewhere between three weeks and three months to undo all the damage they do by telling us stuff that doesn't really apply to Virginia and the East Coast. But I thought that one of the things he did was hit something right on top, a nail right on the head. They wrote a book called $100 an hour jobs on a farm. He highlighted in that talk, soil sampling. But guys, if you're not spending a significant amount of time on your own looking at these variety test results and interpreting them in the best manner for your farm and for your clients, for that matter, then you're missing out a lot on a lot of opportunities. There's a whole lot of variety specific, site specific management that can be done with just a little digging into these sorts of publications. All right, off that soap box and onto the next one. We get a lot of questions about seed treatments and most of you guys know that with the increase in commodity prices, we've seen a huge number of alternatives in seed treatment options, additives, different things. I'm not gonna get into it necessarily per se in terms of endorsing products, but I wanna give you my generalized summary on this and these are products that have been around for quite some time. But we did this, summarized about 30 field trials where we had all of these and that's one of the reasons why it's not as inclusive a list as you might find if you dug a little deeper. We typically saw two and a half to three bushel advantage to the use of just sort of the run-of-the-mill first cut seed treatments. Anybody surprised by that? Probably not, right? Well, and so what it boils down to is that it's almost always at least a break-even proposition. And then in some of these instances, we had nice six, seven, eight bushel yield responses where we had some early season plant disease, Pythium and some other things. We had reduced stance. I guess my message and what I typically give to most of the growers in our part of the world is most of these things, at least at the very basic level, are always a break-even, need to be a part of the management program. Even with saved seed, we're gonna see a nice benefit to some sort of seed treatment. For us, planting date is a big deal. I know it's a different animal for you guys down here because we can wait for the Hessian fly to get up and leave. They figure out it's about to get cold and they go somewhere else. So we wait them out and avoid them in that way. But we're playing two sides of that fence there because we need to develop adequate fall growth. The later we go, the longer it takes us to accumulate the heat necessary to get that crop out of the ground. And so nine days in September is equivalent to 12 days in October is equivalent to 19 days in November to accumulate those same number of heat units. And so it makes a big difference in terms of our growth and development. And it makes a big difference because those tillers that are developed in the fall, they tend to have more kernels per head and larger number of heads than the tillers developed in the spring. Now, can you think why that might be? Well, they're already established and they're doing their thing at that point, right? And they already have a portion of the root system associated with that tiller and you are more mature. And so those are more likely to be competitive at the end of the year. Let me give you a good example. How many of you have seen the wheat compensate to a late season freeze? So you get some freeze damage and then you get a flush of green heads, right? And what are those look like compared to the ones that were there before? Bigger or smaller? Quite a bit smaller, right? It's about that time to assimilate those nutrients back into that plant. And the ones that we developed earlier just tend to be better. An example of what this might look like, some of these plants that are coming out of winter, little barley plants for us coming out of winter where we have more root system on them. Now, the other thing that was part of our yield building factors on top was getting a good stand and planting it to the right population, right? Okay, I show this graph or this picture, a picture to show you the difference between 30 seeds per square foot and 10 seeds per square foot. I'm gonna ask you which one has better yield potential. You guys are on board with that, right? Well, and this is another good example of how those of us who are scientists sometimes have to do the things that we know are inferior just to prove how inferior they are, okay? So sometimes when it seems like we're doing crazy things like leaving a zero nitrogen check or some other things that a farmer would never do, go with us on that. It's part of this treatment comparison scheme. And it helps us build a program that allows us to do something like this. At the end of the year, we know that in Virginia, we need 60 or 70 heads at least per square foot to reach our optimum yield levels, okay? And we know that because several, I somewhat willing graduate students, put little chicken bands around hundreds of thousands of wheat tillers over the years and measured the final yield from each of those tillers. And so the first ones that came out were tagged with yellow and then orange and then green and so forth and they stayed on there all year. So we understood the contribution of that. We also understood the contribution of the density. And so if we know that we need 60 or so at the end of the year, and we know that we get more than one tiller per plant, but that the majority of the yield comes from that first tiller, most of the rest of it comes from the first two tillers. We can back calculate and say that we need 22 to 25 vigorous seedlings per square foot when the drill leaves the field in order to achieve that 60 or 70 heads at the end of the season, okay? A little more complicated than it is for corn, but not much, okay? And then knowing that germination and emergence is not 100%, that means that we're gonna put in about recommendation of about 30 to 35 seeds per square foot. You guys would probably fault me if I didn't point this out. We don't have implements that seed in square feet, they seed in rows. And so the conversion to that is in seven and a half inch rows, it's 20 to 22 seedlings per foot of row in a timely manner. We bumped that up 10% if we're two weeks late and again, if we're four weeks late. How come we don't continue that until six or eight weeks? Doesn't matter. By the time we're a month late, adding a few more seeds is not gonna help us build any more yield potential in that field. We have tapped out, we've run out of the ability to use that warmth that we have left, that heat. Now, to talk to you about seeds per square foot because that relates nicely with our heads per square foot, but it's an important component of getting that right stand. An important component of getting that right stand is to think about the variation in seeds per pound among different varieties and over years. We have some, despite preaching this and the folks for 10 years in Virginia and the folks before me doing the same thing, we don't have 100% of the adoption of this in Virginia and I suspect you guys don't either. But I think it's important to calibrate the drill to deliver the right seeding rate. In order to do that, it's gotta be done on the number of seeds and not necessarily the weight, okay? Now, let me go back and say that the rule of thumb, somebody's rule of thumb that you should plant two bushels to the acre as sort of your standby and that's what it was at one point in time in Virginia is not far off as long as everything's average, okay? If you've got 13,000 seeds per pound and you plant 120 pounds to the acre, how many seeds per square foot do you think you'd get? About 30, okay? So those rule of thumb are not too far off, but look, we go from 11,000 to 16,000 seeds among varieties within a given year and we have 11,000 to 16,000 seeds difference in one variety over years. So some of them vary more than others but it's not at all difficult to see a 15% or 20% increase or decrease in seed size. What does that mean? That means that if you plant the same variety from one year to the next, you may be spending 20% more money for sweet seed than you actually needed. It may mean something much more detrimentally that you are under seeding by 20%, you're not establishing that yield potential that you need, okay? So I think this is an important component of this early season management. I mentioned the push and push back. Here's just some examples of that and the fact that you can get to 100 bush of wheat in a lot of different ways. Let me explain to you where this came from. We did a study a few years ago where we pulled what we thought were the most commonly grown wheat varieties for the last 50 years. So we went and got seed of the things that were popular 50 years ago all the way up until about 2008 or so when we initiated the study. We planted them all in the field together. We planted one block that we treated, basically tried to keep disease free and then we had one block where we just let it fend for themselves with the idea that we wanted to separate the effect of changes in disease resistance. These are the results that we got in the different ways that we achieved yield, a couple of things. One is, you know, you've got two varieties here that both produced 101 bushels to the acre. One did it with 66 heads per square foot, 33 seeds per head. The other one went to 86 and 25, okay? And you guys have all experienced this sort of variation. You walk through the field, you look at these variety plots and you see some that have big heads, but not a lot of them. You see some that have a lot of heads and they're not very big, right? The important part here though is that those are the two things that vary the most among these varieties. And so the things that we are focusing on in terms of genetic improvement would be most variation here as opposed to the harvest index or the seed weight, at least for these varieties that are at the upper yielding end of the scale. Some other components for us, and let me say that I'm not gonna get too deep into this, I'm just gonna give you the Virginia Tech program. We see a significant advantage to some nitrogen in the fall almost without fail. Every now and then we'll, most of our wheat, say 70% of our wheat is followed planting corn. 60% of it is strictly no-till. We almost always see a nice benefit to 20 to 40 pounds of nitrogen pre-plant. In fact, we see a nine pound year loss when we don't do that over about 17 or 18 studies. Now we do do some nitrate soil sampling from the top 12 inches, break them into two sets. If we can do that, especially when we have a failed corn crop or something like that scenario where we know we have a lot of residual carryover, but we're just not in a scenario where, we are in a scenario where this is pretty important to us. We don't put much more than this out there because we lose a lot of water through the soil profile and we don't grow much. I mean, that plant goes from being this big to being that big in four months, not taking up more than about 20 or 30 pounds of in. So there's no reason to put it out there and subject it to losses. We have gone through, I guess, a no-till revolution and I'll have to admit it that those of us on the university side were drugged through it by the producers who adopted it and then told us we better get with the program. So we've tried. We do see a little bit of a differential and a little lower yield on average with our no-till wheat. So this is the same site for 10 years. About a three-bushel advantage to conventional-till wheat. Our producers across the board would say that they more than make up for that by their time, labor, equipment, fuel savings. And the other side of that is there are a number of instances where our no-till yields are as good or better than our conventional-till yields and those for us are the years where we have dry springs. That soil residue cover and no-till system tends to be really beneficial for yields in those situations where we're sort of short on moisture in the springtime. Now one of the things we face with that is that our soil temperatures are a little lower in the fall. Our tillering is not as good typically with our no-till system, so we do one of two things. And this is an example of it. So here's our conventional number of tillers that we've got out there at growth stage 30 or jointing and our no-till system side by side. And we just don't get as much growth in the no-till system. Mostly, I think, because that sunlight radiation is reflected by all that residue that's on the surface, just like you hear about in the more northern corn areas, and just doesn't stay as warm at night. Same thing in terms of biomass. Now what we've come up with is a system where we're doing the one thing we know to make plants grow more at that time of year and let's give them a little more nitrogen. For us, it works out to be a deer season or Thanksgiving application. I'm sure for you guys, if you're doing something like it's gonna be later than that in the year, but the difference between our aim and our standard management at this point is only 20 pounds of nitrogen applied in late October, early November. So it's still tillering. I'm still moving on aggressively. And we can move our tiller numbers up significantly with just a little bit of nitrogen, 10 or 20% increase. So this is a place where we get into a situation where we can't plant early where tiller numbers don't look exactly as good as we'd like for them to be going into winter. And so we take a management intervention and make another application there. Now I'd say that we're not doing that in a vacuum. That number, if we put on 20 pounds there, that number's coming off what we intended to do in the springtime. Because we can't get too much nitrogen on the crop pretty easily. Something that we talk about, no statistics on this slide, but let me tell you that I stole this from the University of Kentucky. This is an average of 11 years looking at different fall weed management strategies in no-till. Obviously no weed management in wheat can be an issue, 10, 12 bushel yield losses. And they saw a nice advantage to using a burn down herbicide. And we always get this question, using a burn down herbicide, even if they don't see many weeds. Lots of things out there that you can't see at that point, there seems to be a benefit of doing it. The other thing I'd say is that, you know, my predecessor and mentor of Virginia Tech, Dr. Dan Brand always said that weed control in wheat was like football, is a fall sport. And it was best played in the fall. And this is an example of that. We've got a plot here. We were actually looking at annual bluegrass control in wheat with a product called Osprey. What you're seeing from here is the rest of the field's treated, untreated, treated, untreated strips. You're seeing some Maristail out here. Who knows how much efficacy that Osprey would have on Maristail. Very, very little, all right? What you're seeing is what the change we made to make this wheat much more competitive by taking out those early season weeds and eliminating these holes for these, you know, kind of opportunistic spring weeds to take hold. Our nitrogen plan is based on two spring applications. We got one shot at growth stage 25 based on tiller density. I said that we need, you know, that 60 or 70 heads at the end of the season. And so our management at this time dictates how much nitrogen we might put on in response to our tiller density of the number of potential heads we have out there at this time. So if we've got more than 100 tillers per square feet, we just back off and say, okay, everything looks good. There's really no need to push this anymore. That's rare. Most of the time we fall into this range and we're in a management decision of exactly how much. If our feedback tells us that we have a really weak stand, that means we've got to prioritize those fields and we've got to move on them right now. We're going to come back in about a month because we need to build that yield potential, but because 60% of our nitrogen occurs after growth stage 30, okay? I mean, look at what happens in terms of the plant growth. You know, this is the majority of the time of the season, but this is the majority of the growth. We use a tissue test based approach. So yeah, you've actually got to crawl around on the ground, cut some samples and send them to the lab. Now, most growers don't do that in every field every year. They do it in instances where they're managing some land they haven't managed before, or maybe you've got consultants do a lot of it to get a feel for what nitrogen rates are going to be sort of in the region for that year, okay? So you don't have to, I don't think you necessarily have to have a sample from every field every year and every instance to take advantage of this program. One, I guess our last couple of thoughts here. You know, the nutrient levels, as Tony was just indicating for corn, this is a dramatic multiplier. If we go from 100 bushel wheat, we're removing about 1.15 pounds of nitrogen per bushel. So we need something in the neighborhood of 120 to 150 pounds of end from soil and fertilizer, right? If we go to 150 bushel wheat, we're at that 175 to 200 pounds of nitrogen removal. And we have some real chores. We've tried to push some of this. We have some real chores trying to figure out exactly how to do this, because this won't work even for us. We can't put two shots of 90 pounds of nitrogen on wheat without getting something that looks like that. And nobody wants to do that. And so we're going to have to be inventive about how we feed this crop if we're going to push these yield levels. We're going to have to think about, maybe return to tram lines in some instances and some other products and some other things that are going to change that. We occasionally have micronutrient responses, especially in our sandy soils, especially when we do something like this where we drive pH up with, in this case, these all happen to be lime-stabilized biosolids. But we're facing some interesting implications again when you look at the uptake associated with how much more sulfur do you need? Well, maybe sulfur's never been a problem in wheat, but if this has been, 10, 12 pounds has been the ask of the system and maybe it's perfectly capable of doing it. 25 or 30 pounds is the ask of the soil system. Maybe we can't do that. I think I'm going to stop there in the interest of time, take a question or two and tell you guys that I'll be around for the rest of the day if you've got anything in specific you want to discuss. Yes, sir. I have a question. When y'all are in this part of the country, when do y'all usually plant some weeds for a wheat crop? And y'all done any studies of planting weeds behind soil veins or peanuts where you may not have to put as much nitrogen out in the fall? Yes, so our typical planting date would be the third week of October. That varies from the third week of September up until the 1st of December depending on where you stand, but that's normal. And yeah, we've done that. We don't have a lot of wheat behind peanuts. We do have a fair amount of wheat behind soybeans and we cut that back depending on the soybean yields to either no nitrogen in that situation or a minimum amount, probably what goes on with as a carrier for a burned down herbicide or something. All right, I've stumped you. Thanks for the opportunity to be here.