What's Been Happening at the WSU Wilke Farm with Aaron Esser

January 10, 2022

Show Notes & Resources Mentioned:

Contact Information:

For questions or comments, contact Aaron Esser via email at aarons@wsu.edu and via cell phone at (509) 660-0566.

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Episode Transcription:

Drew Lyon: Hello. Welcome to the WSU Wheat Beat podcast. I’m your host, Drew Lyon, and I want to thank you for joining me as we explore the world of small grains production and research at Washington State University. In each episode, I speak with researchers from WSU and the USDA-ARS to provide you with insights into the latest research on wheat and barley production. If you enjoy the WSU Wheat Beat podcast do us a favor and subscribe on iTunes or your favorite podcast app and leave us a review so others can find the show too.

[ Music ]

Drew Lyon: My guest today is Aaron Esser. Aaron is with WSU Extension in Lincoln and Adams counties. He has been with WSU for 23 years. In conjunction with his traditional extension program, he has served as Chair for the WSU Wilke Farm Management Committee for the last ten years. The WSU Wilke Research and Extension Farm is a 340-acre facility on the eastern edge of Davenport, Washington in the intermediate rainfall zone. Hello, Aaron.

Aaron Esser: Hello, Drew.

Drew Lyon: So, 2021. Quite the year. I wonder if you can give our listeners a little summary of 2021 at the WSU Wilke Research and Extension Farm.

Aaron Esser: Yeah, thanks, Drew. It’s interesting looking at the contrast, the years coming off of 2020 and then what 2021 can throw at us. Dramatically different. But you know, from a researcher standpoint, it’s interesting to find some things that you didn’t think you’d find on such a year. Just a quick thing about the WSU Wilke Farm. You know, it remains an experiment comparing a four-year rotation, a three-year rotation and continuous rotation. The four-year rotation is where we have summer fallow, winter wheat, spring broad leaf — this year was canola — and then spring cereal. The three year-rotation is fallow, which in this case has no-till fallow. Actually, all the fallow on the farm and the farm itself is all in no-till. We go summer fallow, winter wheat, and spring cereal. And then the continuous cropping is a mixture of those where we where we go spring cereal, re-crop, winter wheat, broadleaf crops and just kind of a mixture, and we kind of let the market dictate where we’re going to go with that, as well as some of the agronomic issues such as weeds or fertilizer or things like that. Just across the farm this last year, though, winter wheat averaged between 55 and 60 bushel. So for the most part, I was fairly happy with that. Spring when averaged between 20 and 24 bushel. And you know, I’m not sure how you can still produce 20 to 24 bushel with 0.93 inches of rain during from seeding through harvest, but that’s what we ended up with. Our spring canola was a little a unique. Part of them — half of our spring canola production frosted out on a May 8th event. So we wrote that out for the insurance company and the other field that we kept in average 705 pounds an acre. So I was pleasantly surprised with that. I was kind of anticipating about half of that. Doing a canola on the farm averaged 1,500 pounds, a little bit lower than what we were anticipating, of course, but we had a lot of research plots and things like that within that within this piece of ground. So that kind of probably took away from some of the yield itself. We’re still working on compiling all the data from this. We collect off the farm, we collect the yield, quality, economic returns, input expenses, wireworm compaction data, complete soil samples. And we’re still working on putting this together. And we put it together and in a summary each and every year.

Drew Lyon: Yeah, I’ve seen those summaries. Those are very thorough. Where can listeners go to see that summary each year?

Aaron Esser: They’re on the Small Grains website, Drew.

Drew Lyon: Okay.

Aaron Esser: I think if you click under Rotational Cropping Systems, you’ll be able to find the link for all of them over the last five or six years, I think.

Drew Lyon: Right. Okay. So, 2021 was maybe a better than you thought it might be, but still wasn’t a banner year. But 2020 was a bit of a different story.

Aaron Esser: Yeah, and 2020 and kind of the, you know, the tale of two stories. 2020 was almost as good as it got and 2021 was, you know, just the complete opposite. But it was nice and interesting. You know, looking at the small plot research that we have on the farm. We really have a mixture of both small and large farm research. On the small farms we use the plot equipment; the large scale, we use the commercial equipment. This past year, we had 22 and a half acres of FSA certified research on the farm. We’re looking at anything from advanced wheat lines with Arron Carter, compost study with Ian Burke, spring wheat seed treatment studies, fungicide treatment — by the way, the fungicide treatment didn’t yield much because we had no stripe rust, but we’ll try again later — looking at canola stand establishment, canola fertilization, looking at mycorrhiza and spring wheat following both winter wheat and winter canola playing off for some of the stuff that Dr. Schillinger did a few years ago. And Paulitz looking at spring following those two crops and kind of decreasing yield, following canola being relayed to mycorrhiza. So we’re looking at that a little bit closer and then multiple weed studies. Large scale we’re continuing the calcium carbonate study that we established in 2026. However, this year we’re not going to get results because it was in the canola field that froze out. Long term rotations studies in the wheat, canola and chickpea that was established in 2014. Fungicide application in winter wheat, ammonium chloride application in winter wheat, large scale spring variety trials this year, as well as a compost study that we added to the farm. So an interesting year. The research continues, though, and some of it produced results and interesting results, and some of it, like the though spring wheat fungicide trial produced no results.

Drew Lyon: Okay, you got all that research on to a 30 340 acre facility, huh? That’s a lot of research.

Aaron Esser: It’s it’s a little bit it takes a little bit of planning.

Drew Lyon: [ laughs ] So you mentioned whole bunch of different research projects are there are one or two that you can pick out that you found quite interesting to share with our listeners?

Aaron Esser: Yeah. The first one I talked about the fungicide application in winter wheat and you hear a lot about plant health and if you go to the Small Grains website and look up the Variety Testing page and use the Variety Selection app, there’s all kinds of numbers on there. One category numbers for foot rot — or stripe rust resistance and then a strawbreaker foot rot. And those are kind of, I call them critical, especially when you’re trying to make fungicide applications in the spring, as well as some of the forecasting that Dr. Chen does. But over the last two years, we’ve planted Resilience Clearfield soft white winter wheat. It has a stripe rust rating of R so it’s resistant, and has a very good strawbreaker foot rot rating of 3. So this variety has very good stripe rust resistance and foot rot resistance. And over the last two years, I’m kind of in that herbicide timing. We’ve been about a week after a herbicide application. We’ve come on and we put a labeled rate of Quilt Xcel on, and this has on the label both stripe rust and strawbreaker foot rot right on the label. And it was interesting over the last two years and very consistent over the two years, and we had three locations over those two years. The fungicide over the last two years has averaged 88 bushel, 88.2 bushel. The check, where we just run water, has averaged 88.6 bushel. And that’s I think contrary to what a lot of people think or believe, and you hear a little bit about plant health and things like that. But overall, we didn’t see any of that. We are going to repeat this for a third year. But over these, these two years, it’s been very, very clear that we haven’t gained anything without fungicide application. However, if we had a different variety, we may see completely different results. I think some of the main conclusion with this is, from a farming standpoint, I think if you understand the variety you have, the resistance it has for both stripe rust and strawbreaker foot rot and the year really makes a lot easier of whether or not to add that fungicide in the tank or not. I know some people say it doesn’t cost that much and it’s a free ride and stuff, but there’s some may be an opportunity to save a few dollars down the road. So that was pretty consistent and nice to see. The other one that really surprised me for the first year with that resilience when we planted it, we had a lot of physiological leaf spot which is related to, you know, some people say it’s related to chloride deficiency. On this last year and our resilience, we put chloride on. We ran 10 pounds of chloride, ammonium chloride prior to seeding the winter wheat and going through with the plots for 500 feet long, 30 feet wide over some diverse terrain that we had in that particular field. And we put in five replications with or without chloride, and this was one that really surprised me. I’ve looked at chloride in the past a little bit, and it’s been kind of a hit and miss. But this last year where we put the ammonium chloride on, we averaged 56 bushels per acre. Where we did not put the chloride on in our check, we averaged 46.1 bushel per acre. So we gained 9.9 bushels with an ammonium chloride application. Very consistent over all five replications. That was one that really made me scratch my head visually. I walk into the trial. I saw no visual differences, really did need my flags to figure out where we put the chloride versus where we did not put the chloride. And that’s another study were repeating. That was in resilience. We repeated it this year. We don’t have resilience, but we put it in with the newer Clearfield variety. I think Parana. So those two really stick out in my mind as something that, you know, from a dry and miserable year and stuff. There’s an idea here potentially save some money, and then there’s an idea here to potentially make some money. So I think those are two key things that I really hope to get some more results on quickly in the future.

Drew Lyon: Aaron Esser: Very interesting that the chloride — I’m not a soil scientist, but I followed that discussion for a number of years and it does seem to be a bit hit and miss, but it sounds very consistent, particularly kind of strange and in such a dry year to see it as well.

Aaron Esser: Well, when you look at I and I am just I’m kind of new to this. I still got to do the background. I got all my chloride samples from these fields that I’ve done put in these trials on. I have a long history, so I have soil samples and stuff. It can match up and look at some of that because, you know, it all depends on a little bit of where we start with. But a little bit of a chloride does, it really does help with water use efficiency in the plant. And, you know, but to get 9.9 bushels on a year like this was just eye-popping.

Drew Lyon: Yeah, that is that’s quite interesting. So what do you have new or different coming along that we should be keeping our eye on?

Aaron Esser: Yeah, it’s an exciting time. You know, when I look at it, weeds, weeds and weeds are what really are going to be keeping farmers up at night, especially trying to get a handle on these winter annual grasses. It’s a big problem. Downy brome, you know, herbicide resistance, group 2 resistance in Clearfield. Across the area that’s that’s one of the biggest issues I see out there. One of the things we’re looking at, I’ve got my hands on some Battalion Pro and we’re looking at utilizing this as a biological control for downy brome as it works over a three to five year period. And it’s one of those things I think that we can utilize to really help some of the some of the numbers. I don’t think it’s going to be one of these tools that’s going to eliminate the numbers, but I think it’s can really help us improve our overall management. So we want to get an idea of that and how farmers can best utilize that. We also are able to get our hands on a WeedIt that we’re putting together this year for the Wilke Farm, and we’ll hopefully have that up and running for this next year. And I’m really excited that for that technology to just get some different modes of action and stuff out there to help minimize even greater the potential for herbicide resistance, especially when you look at Roundup and in being able to bring some other modes of action and stuff into it. One of the things we’ve been utilizing on our fallow the last few, the last two years, and we’re going to be doing an application again here in the next couple of weeks is a Valor application. I know it’s a little on the spendy side, but I really liked utilizing Valor in the summer. Valor gets rid of those hard to control weeds. We really haven’t had to worry about prickly lettuce, mare’s tail, Russian-thistle. And it’s really done a nice job of, I mean, you can see right to the line where we’ve run out with downy brown populations too, coming into the spring of the year and our summer fallow. So it’s really nice to see what it does for for the downy brome and and getting rid of those that really has made our weed control on our summer fallow system a lot easier. And I’m really excited to compare to pair the Valor application with the WeedIt and I think we can come up with some ways to not only save money but also improve the overall efficiency or weed control efficacy of our of our system. And I really want to see what that will do as we move forward. We’ve also kind of taken a little bit different approach where we’re looking at cover crops. And we’ve looked at cover crops on the farm in the past. We mainly focused on warm season grasses or warm season crops. We’re taking a little bit or we’re taking a different look this this time around, and we’re utilizing winter annual crops. So we have winter triticale, winter pea and then we’re doing a winter winter pea/winter triticale mix. And we just seeded this trial a couple of weeks ago, and then it’s going to be ground. We also have a summer fallow check and there are a no tail fallow. And then we’re going to look at some different things with some residue removal and and time of termination and seeing if we can’t get an adequate winter wheat stand and stuff on that and we’re really trying to cut what I call for, no better term “down time”, historically, on our summer fallow, we have about a 13 month of down time where we don’t have anything actively growing. So we’re trying to greatly reduce that number and keep still keep plants actively growing out there. Maybe build some additional nitrogen and look at what we can do for from our soil health standpoint. I’m excited to see where that will go. Am I, you know, really optimistic? I think there’s going to be some things to learn and it’ll be interesting to see where that one takes us as well. So really focus on soil health and weed control as we move forward along with those standard agronomic practices that we’ve been talking about with fungicides and fertilizer and and things like that moving forward, Drew. how

Drew Lyon: So, lots of very interesting work going on at the Wilke Farm. Where can listeners go to learn more about what’s happening there?

Aaron Esser: I try to keep a lot of it. The main one is on that the the publication that that’s on the Small Grains website that has all the details, what we did for the year. All of our production stuff and the way some of the stuff we’re trying to work on updating and revamping the WSU Wilke farm site and my cell phone, I’m very easy, I think, to get a hold of. If you’re interested in this stuff or want to discuss any of it. And my cell phone number is (509) 660-0566; call or text. I’m always happy to discuss anything that we have going on on the farm.

Drew Lyon: All right. Well, thank you for sharing some of that work with us today, Aaron. Hope to have you back on sometime soon to hear more of what you’re doing at the Wilke farm.

Aaron Esser: Thanks a lot, Drew. I greatly appreciate it.

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Drew Lyon: Thanks for joining us and listening to the WSU Wheat Beat podcast. If you like what you hear don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you have questions or topics, you’d like to hear on future episodes please email me at drew.lyon — that’s lyon@wsu.edu — (drew.lyon@wsu.edu). You can find us online at smallgrains.wsu.edu and on Facebook and Twitter @WSUSmallGrains. The WSU Wheat Beat podcast is a production of CAHNRS Communications and the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University. I’m Drew Lyon, we’ll see you next time.

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests of this podcast are their own and does not imply Washington State University’s endorsement.