Mixing Corn with Soybeans
Filed under: Ask Grant, Food Plots
We are about to plant our Eagle Seed soybeans and want to mix in some RR corn with them. When we sent off the soil samples, they ask what crop you are going to plant. We said soybeans but didn’t mention the corn. The soybeans don’t require nitrogen but the corn will. Do we need to add nitrogen to the mix for the corn when we fertilize? Is this something we should add later when the corn starts to come up? Thank You! Kevin
Kevin,
I used to mix corn with soybeans, but don’t anymore because I’ve learned the yield is much higher when planting the two crops separately and managing each plot for the specific crop. Your question is a good example. For the corn to do well, you’d need to broadcast nitrogen throughout the entire plot, but the reduced corn density will not take advantage of the nitrogen throughout the plot. It’s true that Eagle Seed forage beans produce a lot of nitrogen, but it is distributed throughout the plot.
When considering the timing of planting, spraying, and crop specific fertilizer needs the yield of each crop would be much better to plant 1/3 of the plot in corn and 2/3 of the plot in beans. If that is simply not practical for your situation, then I’d reduce the corn seeding rate to 5,000 kernels per acre and mix with the beans.
For those that might not be familiar, seed corn is sold in bags of 80,000 kernels. So it is easy to determine the weight of 5,000 kernels by dividing the total weight of a bag of corn by 16 to determine the weight of 5,000 kernels.
Growing Deer together,
Grant
