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Sorghum after wheat hail-out remains a welcome recoveryBy Larry Dreiling That old phrase, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade" can be adjusted for some wheat producers every spring. It could be, "When Mother Nature hails out your wheat, grow sorghum." It's a tradition almost as time-honored as anything in agriculture, raising a sorghum crop following a spring hail-out of a winter wheat crop. If anything can--and often does--keep wheat producers farming another year after a hail storm, it's a follow-up with grain sorghum. Examine the weekly crop progress reports issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service for Kansas, the largest sorghum producing state, and a large bump-up can be seen in the amount of sorghum planted in a small window of late May and early June. By that time, the hail season has delivered much of its fury to the wheat crop, leaving producers to salvage their cropping year by growing a sorghum crop. Mark Myers was one of those sorts of producers who made a comeback last year with an extended crop of grain sorghum. Myers, a Thomas County, Kan., producer, already had grain sorghum in his dryland rotations, but added additional acres to recover from a hail-out of his wheat crop. "We did really well this past year," Myers said. "I already had adequate moisture when the hail came, then added about four more inches of rain after that through the season. We averaged 110 bushels to the acre. For a second crop, it wasn't bad."
Yield leader Myers has flourished in sorghum production for many years, beginning in 1985 assisting his father-in-law. But, he really didn't know how good he was until 1988, when his crop consultant told him his crop might be good enough to do well in the National Grain Sorghum Producers Association yield contest. "I won the national title that year for conventional flood-irrigated milo. The crop made 188 bushels," Myers said. "It was a longer-season milo planted early. Everything hit perfectly and it yielded really well." Nowadays, Myers pretty much confines his sorghum production to the dryland corners of his 18 pivots covering 2,600 acres, again as a recovery crop for hailed-out wheat. "In the last few years, I haven't been planting much irrigated sorghum, like I used to, because of the price of corn," Myers said. "Back when, the cost of putting in milo was a whole lot cheaper because the herbicides for corn were very high. Now, with the Roundup Ready corn products, it's kind of changed the scenario and they have really taken over those acres." Another set of changes Myers has gone through in recent years is establishing a strip-till operation along with the use of Real Time Kinetics precision farming. "I've been using strip-till for five years," Myers said. "The Irrigation Research Foundation in Yuma, Colo. has done a lot of work on strip-till. They've showed there's quite a lot of difference in staying on top of those rows in strip-till." For his efforts in trying strip-till Myers won the Thomas County Bankers Conservation Award in 2006. "Strip-till controls weeds well on irrigation. It controls the trash," Myers said. "I tried to no-till this past year and the stuff didn't come up as well as I expected. It also wasn't as fun to plant, either."
He needs his RTK Myers said he "likes the look" of using RTK precision. "I think that will really control the weeds," Myers said. "We have had a lot of problems with Palmer amaranth. We couldn't control them with no-till anyway. You work that ground in fall so that next spring those weeds are right there ready to germinate. Get them germinated then kill them. When you get ready to plant, you have a weed-free zone." Myers said that in his situation, his fields could not be strip tilled without using RTK. "I tried to strip-till without RTK and realized I needed it," Myers said. "I like the repeatability of RTK. You can go back to the same field with a planter or a sprayer and make the same mark over again. "I no longer have problems with markers that are cumbersome. It also used to be that when it got dark you were done for the day. Now, you can change fields in the middle of the night. I stayed up until midnight once." Staying up until midnight may seem like nothing to a college student, but to Myers, it's a big deal. "When I was 20 years younger, I once started planting on a Monday morning and had 50 hours on the tractor by Wednesday noon. Using RTK isn't as crazy as what I used to do. When I went to RTK I also went from an eight-row corn head to a 12-row model, so I'm more efficient there, too." No matter how many acres he grows, whether on dryland or irrigated ground, Myers is committed to grain sorghum through his membership on the board of the Kansas Grain Sorghum Producers Association. "What got me into being an officer in the Grain Sorghum Producers is the legislative end of things," Myers said. "With our work on the farm bills, we were able to do things to give more people a fair break on crop insurance and crop programs. It also helps with the chemical regulation problems we've been having, such as the atrazine regulation problems we've had."
A united front A farmer-run organization like KGSPA, Myers said, can really help in presenting a united front for agriculture. "I really like the fact that all the grower groups are working together on things, more and more," Myers said. "At least out here, we all plant a little bit of everything, so there's no use in fighting over acreage. We need to be taking care of everyone, I think." That includes teaching producers the idea of putting more money away for a rainy day (or for a drought year) and paying off years of debt. "Plus, as long we want a cheap food supply, we need farm programs," Myers said. "I heard someone say 'A monkey can make money in farming right now.' But I look at the rally in crop prices and increases in rents, inputs and equipment and it's setting up to be just like the 1970s all over again. There's going to be another bad day someday."
Larry Dreiling can be reached by phone at 785-628-1117 or by e-mail at ldreiling@aol.com. 3/17/08 Date: 3/13/08 Advertisement
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