Posted on May, 8, 2025 at 04:24 pm
Corn and soybean production may not be simple, but it is a known quantity that works.
Part of the challenge of working small grains into a corn-soybean rotation is economics — making small grain pay. And all of that still comes down to managing the crop for the results you want.
Trent Kubik farms in south-central South Dakota with his wife, Shannon, and two brothers and their families. As a farmer and co-owner of a farm supply business, Elevate Agronomics, he works with small grains on his farm and in serving customers.
As secretary/treasurer of the South Dakota Corn Growers Association, Kubik also knows the challenges of working small grains into a crop rotation, because on his own farm they raise corn, soybeans, sorghum and alfalfa, along with running a cow-calf operation.
For Kubik, how you manage small-grain production on your farm matters when it comes to the bottom line.
“Growing up on the farm in the early 1990s, you planted your wheat crop, maybe fertilized it, and that was it,” Kubik says. “You walked away until harvest.” Things have changed.
“How you manage your small grain depends on how successful you want to be,” he says. “You can have a really successful wheat crop, for instance, but it’s going to take lot of management and similar fertilizer needs like a good corn crop is going to take, with multiple fungicide passes.
“If you do all those things, the payout is going to be great because when you protect that crop at key times and give it all the fertility it needs, you can take some 80 to 90 bushels per acre of wheat off at harvesttime, and the better the economics are going to be.”
Kubik says that last year in South Dakota was a good growing season for small grains. “The farmers who managed their small grains with fungicides and fertility had good yields and test weights,” he says. “In fact, some were able to market high-test-weight oats into Tennessee and their horse feed market.”
Another South Dakota farmer couldn’t find a good market for his high-quality oats, so he developed his own oatmeal company and began processing it himself. “Sometimes you have to think outside the box if you want to incorporate some of these crops,” Kubik adds.
Many portions of the upper Great Plains were once considered small-grain country. Before soybeans came into the crop rotation mix, oats, barley, wheat and rye combined as cash crops, feed and forage for livestock on diversified family farms.
Times have changed. Soybeans have long overtaken small grains, including wheat. While the economic value of a soybean cash crop is well documented, for many farmers, the knowledge of beneficial small grains in the rotation has been lost.
Part of the benefit is hard to quantify because it comes in a subsequent crop such as corn or sorghum. Tracy Zink, who farms in the arid southwest portion of Nebraska near Indianola, raises wheat, corn and grain sorghum. For her, one economic advantage of her wheat crop comes in yields the following season.
“My agronomist has always told me,” Zink says, “that we don’t grow wheat for profit. We grow it for the following crop's benefit.”
Zink’s preferred rotation for dryland is to plant into wheat stubble. “It’s where we anticipate having the most yield potential, or in dry years, having a chance to reach harvest,” she explains. “If there is snow cover, the wheat stubble catches it the best, and the heavy residue protects the soil from evaporation, along with reducing spring weed pressure.”
Zink harvests with a Shelbourne stripper header, leaving much of the wheat straw intact, with plant stems still attached to the ground.
“Before we had the Shelbourne, we would plan for a 5- to 10-bushel boost in yield in the crop planted after wheat,” she says. “With the Shelbourne, I am anticipating a 10- to 15-bushels-per-acre increase.”
The key is the summer-fall season after wheat harvest, Zink adds. “That year of gathering moisture, the wheat success is because of that.”
If you are looking at adding small grains, Kubik says that livestock offers flexibility with your crop.
“Whether it is your own livestock or your neighbor’s, you can run them on small grain if you don’t have a readily available market,” he says. “In our part of South Dakota, a lot of local elevators aren’t buying oats because it can be a hard thing to market.
“So, look at livestock integration, harvesting that crop and planting a new forage into the stubble or not even harvesting the crop for grain, but harvesting it through the mouth of a large ruminant like a cow. Through grazing, we are building organic matter in the soil. We are giving that soil a little bit of a break too.”
But that is the hardest part. “It’s hard to take that corn and soybean income out, but it’s one of those things in that it is a long-term play,” Kubik says. “If you have irrigation, interseed small grains into corn and soybeans, get a cover crop established, so when you harvest, you can graze it or just let it go into winter.”
How about your herbicide plan? “We missed the boat early a couple of times in herbicides we applied to small grains,” Kubik recalls. “So, we have to be cognizant if we want to have a cover crop, if we include brassicas into that, because there are some chemicals we are applying to small grain that will suppress those.”
He suggests planning herbicide programs with an agronomist early in the season, incorporating goals for the crop and any cover crop seeding.
“You may give up some weed control because you are going to take some products out of the mix, but it’s not the hill to climb like we think it is or like it used to be,” Kubik notes. “There are still a lot of options for your chemicals so you can get those small grains into your rotation.”
Tackle diseases through genetics. Newer certified seed varieties offer much better disease resistance in most small grains than older varieties, Kubik says.
“Make sure you are planting good, certified seed from your own area,” he says. “There are a lot of great varieties developed for the Northern Plains, for instance. But planting certified seed is key because the farther your seed is from certified status, the more susceptible to disease it will be.”
Winter wheat production, the largest sector of small-grain markets in the U.S., was up 9% in 2024 — coming in at 1.35 billion bushels — according to the Sept. 30 Small Grains Annual Summary from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service.
All U.S. wheat production totals were up over 2023, coming in at 1.97 billion bushels, which includes combined winter, durum and other spring wheat.
Oats was also a big winner last year, producing an estimated 67.8 million bushels on 886,000 harvested acres, for an average yield of 76.5 bushels per acre. About 2.2 million acres were planted into oats last season, but most of those acres were harvested as a forage crop or used as a grazing, cover or nurse crop. Still, production was up for oats by a whopping 19%, according to NASS.
U.S. rye production for 2024 was estimated at 14.7 million bushels, up 42% over 2023, with slightly fewer acres planted but more acres harvested than the previous year. Barley totals took a big hit in 2024, down 23% from the previous year, coming in at 144 million bushels of production.
Source: Farm Progress