No Till Notes: 'Drilling Beans'

We decided this year to go back to drilling our edible bean crop rather than use the 15 inch planter we have used over the past several years. We saw some agronomic advantages to going back to using the drill which plants the beans in 7.5 inch rows.

The narrower row spacing should help with weed control in our fields by developing a faster crop canopy which will compete better with weeds than the wider row spacings. Our main concern with weed pressure is the palmer amaranth weed which we first discovered last year in one of our fields.

We also felt the narrower row spacing should encourage the bean plants to grow more upright. Upright plant architecture should help with the direct harvesting of our edible bean crop.

We first drilled edible beans several years ago with our air seeder. At the time we didn’t have the additional weight that we have added to the drill. Our first attempt at edible bean drilling resulted in somewhat uneven plant emergence. At the time we didn’t feel we penetrated the previous crops residues well enough. We had good stands of beans in portions of the field and other areas where the bean stand was less than desirable.

Since that time we have added additional weight to our drill frame which helps to penetrate the irrigated corn residues we are planting into. I think the additional weight will really help us with stand establishment this year. I think we will have a much more consistent stand than we did when we first attempted drilling edible beans.

We visited with several producers around the region about plant populations when drilling edible beans. The range of plant populations producers were planting ranged from 110,000 to 150,000 seeds per acre. We decided to plant in the middle of this range and settled on 130,000 live plants per acre.

As more and more producers move towards direct seeding of edible beans and direct harvesting of edible beans we will begin to improve upon the production of edible beans in no till crop production. The benefits of conserving groundwater by reducing irrigation requirements with no till crop production will be important as producers learn to raise profitable crops with less irrigation water pumping.