ST. LOUIS, Mo. — The USDA Winter Wheat Seedings report, released Jan. 12, reported wheat seeding up 11 percent in Kentucky over last winter, from 540,000 to 600,000 acres.

A presentation by a University of Kentucky (UK) researcher at the National No-Tillage Conference in St. Louis the same day of the report indicated no-till planting has much to do with Kentucky’s winter wheat acreage increase over recent years.

Kentucky’s increase was the greatest in its region. Winter wheat seedings in Tennessee rose by 30,000 acres, or 7 percent. Seedings in Illinois, Indiana and Missouri declined by 180,000 acres. A record low wheat area, 580,000 acres, was planted in Ohio last fall, because of wet soil conditions. This was a 300,000-acre decline (34 percent) from Ohio’s 2010 planting.

Seedings in Michigan also declined sharply. National winter wheat area was reported at 41.9 million acres, up 3 percent from 2011, due to increases in major wheat-producing states such as Oklahoma and Texas.

Lloyd Murdock, Ph.D., estimated no-till is now used on 70 percent of Kentucky’s harvested wheat acres. Using the reported USDA wheat seeding levels, more than 400,000 acres of wheat were apparently no-tilled in Kentucky last fall. Murdock is a soil scientist and director of the UK Research and Education Center at Princeton.

No-till wheat production in Kentucky has increased over the same period that Kentucky’s total harvested wheat acreage has also increased, he said. No-till production was used on 40 percent of wheat harvested in Kentucky in 2002, or about 128,000 of the 320,000 harvested wheat acres reported in the 2002 Census of Agriculture.

Recent reports indicate Kentucky’s no-till wheat acres have more than tripled during the past decade, while harvested wheat acreage has approximately doubled.

The USDA report stated lower wheat plantings last fall in the Corn Belt were due to a late row crop harvest. Kentucky producers often cite labor and time management during the busy row crop harvest season as key reasons for no-tilling wheat, said Murdock.
 Improvements in production research, no-till technology and demonstration of no-till wheat profitability have also helped no-tillage increase in Kentucky’s wheat acreage.

Increased wheat plantings this season coincide with reports of lower wheat stocks.

The USDA Grain Stocks report, also released Jan. 12, reported all wheat stored in all positions Dec. 1, 2011, totaled 1.66 billion bushels, down 14 percent from a year earlier.

Murdock also reported ongoing wheat production research involving Kentucky farms using the GreenSeeker variable rate nitrogen (VRN) application system. GreenSeeker technology is a real-time applicator that determines the health of the wheat when nitrogen is applied.

According to the university’s report, basic field research from 2008-10 has improved the software algorithms that tell the machine how much nitrogen to add. The adjusted algorithms were scientifically tested on a field basis for the second year, in 2011.

The research showed positive and statistically significant returns for the use of the VRN technology in wheat in both 2010 and 2011, Murdock said. In 2011, the effect of the GreenSeeker technology in the field trials was an increase in yield of 3.9 bushels per acre and a decrease in nitrogen application of 7.9 pounds per acre. This translated to an average increase in returns of $19 per acre.

At this rate of return, Murdock said, the cost of adopting the technology could be recouped within one year, when used on 1,000 acres of wheat. He said there were, to his knowledge, four GreenSeeker units currently in use in western Kentucky.

A report of the research may be accessed at the UK Wheat Science webpage, www2.ca.uky.edu/wheatscience