Things to Consider before Replanting
Spring planting sometime has to be done more than once. Replanting can happen for different reasons. Jim Smart, research and teaching agronomist for Ag Spectrum, talks about some common mistakes farmers can make when replanting.
“People get in too big of a hurry to replant. And before we make that decision, we need to check what our growing-degree days have been. If it’s been cool and damp, and we haven’t accumulated at least 115 or 120 growing-degree days, it may not have enough warm temperatures to get the plants to emerge. Now, if we’ve exceeded those numbers for growing-degree days, then we can look and see what is the issue and why they’re not coming up. And sometimes, different varieties are just a little bit slow coming up, or perhaps that cold germ’s a little weak, but they’re still coming. They just haven’t emerged yet. If we do have to replant, we hate to replant if you’re 25 or 30 days past the rest of the field, you’re quite a bit behind on your maturity if you wait that long.”
He talks about replanting part of a field versus redoing the whole thing.
“I hate to just do one little corner or one spot because once the grower starts replanting, he almost doesn’t know where to stop and where to start again. So usually, we need an area, and it might be 40 acres out of 160 or something, that’s okay to just replant that portion. When we start trying to scab in or just doing the end rows, generally it’s not very successful, and then we have plants that are way behind, so we’ll either have wet grain or will have with soybeans, sometimes the other soybeans are ready to start popping out while the replant isn’t even mature yet. It’s better to select a uniform area, whether it’s a square or rectangle, and just do a whole field or a big portion of it and mark it.”
Hybrid variability can be an important factor to consider when looking at a replant.
“Very vigorous hybrids generally come up very quickly and very uniformly, and there are some other hybrids that, if you’re expecting all of them to emerge within 24 hours, they just won’t do that. Checking your growing degree days is important because the more vigorous hybrids generally will all come up, and if we’ve got some seed that’s a little bit weaker or maybe it’s an old seed, it’s going to take a little while for some of those later-germinating seeds to come up. We don’t all have perfect growing conditions. So, hybrids do make a big difference.”
Certain types of in-furrow nutrition packages can hurt the seed’s germination rate.
“A producer will want to choose an in-furrow nutritional package that will not hurt the germ or is seed-safe and there’s several of those available. But just because something’s cheaper doesn’t mean it’s better, so that’s important to see, also. Oftentimes with the superior nutrition of in-furrow seed, those seeds will come out quicker and emerge more uniformly than ones that do not have the nutrition. So frequently, we don’t need to replant where we have superior nutrition placed on the seed.”
If farmers use in-furrow nutrition during planting, he talks about using it again during replanting.
“Phosphorus and some of the other nutrients are tied up within two or three weeks on most types of in-furrow nutrition. If you’ve been 16-18 days since you planted and you made the call that we need to replant, you’re going to start over, o just go ahead and put more nutrition on the seed. Even with auto steer, it’s very hard to get in the exact row that you were in, and much of that nutrition may be unavailable for the new seeds that you’re trying to plant. So, if you want to start over and have a good response, just start over with your nutrition, also.”
For more information, go to agspectrum.com.
