Like many Saskatchewan farmers, Dale Richter was hit with a killing frost last year before summer was over.
“It was a total disaster,” said Richter, who farms near Broadview.
“There was nothing in the flax to harvest at all. The bolls were just starting to form and there was still the odd flower coming. When it froze, there was nothing there. Everything just dried up.”
With his yield gone, Richter faced another problem – a field full of crop residue. A customer service representative from one of the local grain companies told him she had heard of a neighbour who had tried seeding with a disc drill into standing flax, and Richter decided to give it a trial run without seed.
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“The first time I just cut it through to see if it would work. I made a pass and once I found out it would work, I thought this might save myself from having to burn the residue. And there was good growth there to catch snow for a fall-seeded crop.”
In mid-September, Richter began seeding 400 acres of winter wheat on his frozen flax fields. He used an 8870 John Deere tractor to pull his 43-foot 1895 John Deere disc drill.
“I put two bushels of CDC Clair per acre, with 30 pounds of phosphate and 10 lb. of potash with the seed. In the spring I went in with the high clearance sprayer and dribble banded 60 lb. of nitrogen on.”
The 1895 drill has three rows of disc openers. Richter normally uses the front row for mid-row banding nitrogen, but with the winter wheat, he applied all his fall fertilizer with the seed. As a result, he lifted up the front row when seeding through the flax straw.
“It’s something that probably couldn’t be done with a shank-type opener machine,” he said.
“A shank sort of rips through the ground. That would disturb the straw and then you’d have plugging problems. With the disc, it kind of rolled everything over top. It did cut through the straw where it needed to, but it placed the seed in a good position.”
The frozen flax still stood 64 to 71 centimetres tall. Richter said in places it was to the top of the air drill frame.
“The only place where the straw stayed laying down was where the tractor wheels and the commodity cart went. The rest of the straw popped back up. If you were driving by the field parallel to the way it was seeded, you couldn’t even tell there was anything done to it.”
Richter seeded the winter wheat in the same direction he seeded the flax so the wheat rows were often between the flax rows. He felt seeding the same direction didn’t trample the flax crop as much and left more stubble standing.
“I thought I’d have trouble seeding into it with the disc drill. You’ve got all those wheels that are turning and flax is known for wrapping around anything that turns. But I never had any problems that way at all.”
The crop was anchored and there wasn’t anything loose to pull out and bind. He said he had fewer problems seeding into the frozen standing flax straw than he did in the spring trying to seed into crop that had been combined.
“In the spring, we had wet conditions. You’d get some buildup of dirt, then short pieces of straw that would bind between the disc and gauge wheel. When it was damp out, you’d have some plugging problems. In the fall, it went through like you wouldn’t believe.”
It was dry when he seeded the winter wheat and much of it didn’t come up until October, when he received 18 millimetres of rain.
He said some of the wheat didn’t establish last fall, but what did establish yielded well.
“Yields this fall range from in the 30s to over 70 bu. per acre in the good spots,” he said.
Before seeding, Richter sprayed the flax with glyphosate to stop the plants from using more moisture.
He said the areas where the winter wheat didn’t establish as well ended up with more wild oats, forcing him to spray most of it for wild oats and broadleaf weeds in the spring.
One advantage of the standing flax was how it held almost a metre of snow over most of the winter.
“And it never got to be that real hard packed snow. It was always kind of soft; nice to snowmobile in.”
Because this spring was so cool, Richter said the winter wheat was slow out of the gate.
“But it poked its way through there. The local agronomist said it was the best winter wheat catch he’d seen this year.”
Even with half-a-metre-tall flax stubble, Richter said the winter wheat plants seemed to receive enough sunlight to get them going.
“It didn’t seem to cause much problem. In the spring, the flax dried up a little more, so that seemed to let enough sunlight through.”
The flax stuck around until this fall and was about 30 centimetres shorter than the winter wheat by harvest time. When Richter combined the wheat, the flax straw went through the combine without problems.
While he feels the decision to seed the winter wheat into the standing flax crop was a success, Richter said from what he learned last year, he’d probably do a few things differently if the situation ever repeats itself.
“When it froze, I didn’t know what was going to happen with the flax, so I left it for three weeks to see.
“I would have liked to have more advice regarding what would happen because if I would have known after a week that the crop was ruined, I would have got out there and sprayed some glyphosate as soon as I could, to kill the plants so they wouldn’t suck any more moisture out of the ground. Then I could have got my winter wheat seeded a couple of weeks earlier.”
