By Brad Haire
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.
Godwin’s 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.
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