Oats and corn companion planting?

[Timmycornpicker]

So…

We don’t know where you are, your soils and your climate is the thing.

Here we like to plant oats as soon as we possibly can. Oats like a cool spring and cooler temps when it flowers. Plant in April - end of March in a sweet early spring if you can -, harvest in early August.

Corn needs all summer to grow, but you don’t want it to freeze. So plant closer to May. Harvest in October. It likes the hot humid long summer days.

So I don’t understand how any of your plan would work. The oats needs harvested first. That isnt fun by hand, especially mixed with corn crop.

Corn likes to emerge and grow about 6 inches tall, then sits there and grows its root structure. If anything shades it, that disrupts its pattern and abandons the root building, and tries to outgrow whatever is shading it. But with the poor roots now, the plant is devastated and will never yield well. So your oats will screw up your corn yields.

Oats needs sunshine as it flowers and then fills the seeds out. If you have corn mixed in with it, the corn will shade the oats and mess up the oat kernel filling out.

Both are grasses, so they also will be competing for the same nutrients. They will not complement each other. If you put a corn crop and a bean crop together for example, one of the crops will suffer but it at least helps the other crop, somewhat. Using your two grass crops, there is no benefits to either.

If you try to plant oats late, it does not grow good test weight kernels. The timing is all wrong, it flowers and tries to fill out the kernels in the wrong weather, and you get 20# test weight oats, basically just hulls. It might look nice from the road, but it’s a terrible grain crop.

In any of the mixed planting options (I’m guessing, based on my local conditions), both crops will be harmed and yield lower and have poorer quality grain, low test weight, lower nutrition because your 2 grass crops are competing with each other and harming each other, or because you would be planting them at the wrong times. This would result in poorer feed quality, not better than what you could buy at the feed store?

I also realize this is an older thread, but I would be very interested to know what you tried, and how it is turning out. In your climate perhaps things are different and it can work out. Would love to learn from you, even if it would never work ‘here’, what works ‘there?’

Paul

I have wondered how planting soybeans on 30" rows into a short winter barley variety in early May might do. To minimize the abount of barley run down, I'd use a toolbar-mounted 3-point no-till planter with any drive wheels needed set in front of the row units, and have the tread of a tractor with narrow tires set to be on the rows. Use GPS for guidance so no damage from markers. In theory, the barley could be combined in late June cutting just under the heads (or maybe with a stripper header), running whatever straw there was through a wide-spread chopper. The combine would have to have wheels spaced to go between the rows of beans, which shouldn't yet be tall enough to get cut. They might get too spindly trying to grow up through the standing grain, though.

 

[paul]

I have wondered how planting soybeans on 30" rows into a short winter barley variety in early May might do. To minimize the abount of barley run down, I'd use a toolbar-mounted 3-point no-till planter with any drive wheels needed set in front of the row units, and have the tread of a tractor with narrow tires set to be on the rows. Use GPS for guidance so no damage from markers. In theory, the barley could be combined in late June cutting just under the heads (or maybe with a stripper header), running whatever straw there was through a wide-spread chopper. The combine would have to have wheels spaced to go between the rows of beans, which shouldn't yet be tall enough to get cut. They might get too spindly trying to grow up through the standing grain, though.

I’ve seen experiments with that. Some use a sort of a pan to push down the beans away from the cutter bar while combining the wheat.

It seems it is one of those, can work well sometimes deals? Over a 5 year period it seems most grow tired of it, the extra costs and hassle outrun the extra income.

Can’t imagine it works well on a difficult weather year, too dry and both crops run out of moisture, too wet and harvesting the wheat destroys the beans.

Be neat if they perfected it tho, got it working well. Combining a grass crop and legume crop they can compliment each other while growing.

Paul

 

[ss55]

Double cropping soybeans into wheat has been somewhat successful in regions of the southern corn belt with longer growing seasons. Maybe check it that works in your area.

I would be very cautious about mixing corn and oats as the planting times, germination temperatures, the harvest times and crop heights are so very different. Oats is a cool season crop with a short ( 100 day in Iowa? ) early growing season, while corn has a long ( 140 to 160 days in Iowa? ) growing season.

I assume you are planning to chop it all into silage to feed to some livestock, cattle? If you are actually going for grain, when the oats is mature the corn already will be much taller than the oats but the corn will only be at the tassel stage with absolutely no grain in the ears yet. When the corn is mature, and the oat grain will all be shattered onto the ground long before the corn is mature.