Category: Crop Production

Thomas Björkman, Section of Horticulture, Cornell University

Buckwheat is a historic crop in New York and Pennsylvania that is seen higher demand as a gluten-free food, and is financially attractive when commodity-crop prices are at today’s low. This article provides an update on the organization of the American buckwheat industry and some thoughts on how the crop fits in New York agriculture.

Recent interest in gluten-free foods has driven an increase in demand for buckwheat. The largest supplier of buckwheat to US food markets is The Birkett Mills right here in Penn Yan, NY. Birkett Mills has needed to contract supplies further from their mill in order to meet that demand. This year they have significant contracts as far away as Minnesota and Prince Edward Island. Their demand could be met much closer to home if more New York farmers raised it.

The Birkett Mills has a long history in this area. It was founded in 1797 as a water driven mill at the outlet to Keuka Lake. At that time, many mills were established in central New York as the region was settled by Europeans. Birkett Mills has the distinction of being one of the few mills that remains, and is still in the original location.

Some of the buckwheat flour is used to make the iconic buckwheat pancakes, but that is far from the only use. A substantial amount becomes roasted groats, called kasha, a staple of Eastern European cuisine. The company’s kasha is available in grocery stores nationally. Buckwheat meal, similar to cornmeal or cream of wheat, is used as an ingredient by food manufacturers. It is sold as “Cream of Buckwheat” breakfast cereal, but this versatile product is also used to make polenta. Polenta is well known in northern Italian cuisine is a corn dish. But before North American corn came to Italy, it was made with buckwheat.

There is one other mill of significance producing food ingredients from buckwheat, Minn-Dak in North Dakota. Much of their production is shipped to Asia. Two large growers in eastern Washington State export all of their production to Asia as whole grain. There are also a handful of small mills in the East that mill a few acres of buckwheat. Overall, the buckwheat marketing is highly concentrated.

There is also a thriving buckwheat seed industry to provide seed for cover crops and wildlife food plots. One of the major producers in this arena is seed way. They processed buckwheat at the historic AgriCulver mill south of Mecklenburg in Schuyler County. That mill served many growers in the Southern Tier when buckwheat was one of the primary crops in the region in the late 19th century.

Buckwheat breeding was privatized in the 1990s, so the premium varieties that are used for food have all been under total production contracts. Many find it surprising that this seemingly neglected crop one of the pioneers in adopting this model of funding breeding and seed production.

Buckwheat for food is largely the proprietary variety, Koto, released by breeder Clayton Campbell in the late 1990s. Other users largely produce Mancan, Dr. Campbell’s first release, in 1972. Some growers, based on old production guides, go looking for ‘Japanese’ or ‘Silverhull’ varieties. These have not been in commerce for five decades or more.

A contemporary role for buckwheat in field-crop production is to manage glyphosate-resistant weeds. The essential principle for herbicide-resistance management is the weeds die from many different causes. When a buckwheat crop is in the rotation, it effectively smothers a portion of the weeds. It is effective against most of weeds that have developed glyphosate resistance in New York. For these annuals, the trick is to have the weed seed germinate just a few days after the buckwheat so that they are smothered. A good buckwheat planting should show greenline by the morning of the fourth day, and outcompete the many weed seeds that germinate then. Buckwheat is also used in organic production to suppress quack grass, and prevent it from becoming a big problem.

Experienced farmers who have not raised buckwheat generally show an interest either when corn prices are low or planting season has been wet. When corn appears to be breakeven or a money loser because prices are too low, buckwheat can be profitable because the input costs are so much less. For 2016, a 120-bushel corn crop would give a ne loss of $100 per acre by my calculation, whereas the same ground planted to buckwheat would net a profit of $100. In a wet spring, buckwheat can be a catch crop on unplanted ground. The time to sow buckwheat at the beginning of July, after the opportunity to plant corn and soybeans has already passed.

Buckwheat’s low input requirements made it the mainstay on hill farms with low soil fertility and weak finances. Much of that ground is now appropriately in either forest or pasture. The farming community began to associate buckwheat with farms having the toughest time. Particularly during the Depression when buckwheat acreage was dropping elsewhere in favor of corn. In New York, that stigma persisted for decades and was still noticeable in the 1980s and 90s. The social factor likely prevented many people from trying buckwheat when it would have been a wise and profitable addition to their rotation. Some of the bigger buckwheat growers even put the crop in fields that were not visible from main roads. The stigma seems to be wearing off. Activities such as the Northeast Buckwheat Growers Association has helped bring buckwheat growers out of the shadows and bring them respect for their professionalism.

Today there is no “typical” buckwheat grower, but a few common themes emerge. A few are specialized, where buckwheat is a big part of their regular rotation and they have invested in equipment to make harvest as efficient and effective as possible. Many farmers raise a few acres of buckwheat from time to time as a catch crop on fields that could not be planted to their intended crop. Weekend farmers can start with buckwheat because it does not require day-to-day attention, the cost of basic equipment is low, and it grows satisfyingly fast even on the lower fertility fields that these farmers often own. A surprisingly large proportion of these weekend farmers are engineers who have worked at one of the Central New York’s big technology firms. Organic field crops growers use buckwheat to diversify their rotation and reduce weed pressure.

Farmers today can take pride, and profit, in raising some buckwheat as part of their rotation. Production information is available at www.hort.cornell.edu/bjorkman/lab/buck/

Bill Cox¹, Eric Sandsted¹, and Gary Bergstrom^2
1Soil and Crop Sciences Section, ²Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology Section – School of Integrated Plant Science, Cornell University

We have conducted numerous studies over the last 10 years on soybean seeding rates. In almost all instances, we rarely observed a response to rates above 150,000 seeds/acre (http://scs.cals.cornell.edu/sites/scs.cals.cornell.edu/files/shared/documents/wcu/Vol16No22006Mar-Apr.pdf; http://scs.cals.cornell.edu/sites/scs.cals.cornell.edu/files/shared/documents/wcu/WCUVol18No3_May-Jun2008-2.pdf; http://scs.cals.cornell.edu/sites/scs.cals.cornell.edu/files/shared/documents/wcu/wcu19-1.pdf; http://scs.cals.cornell.edu/sites/scs.cals.cornell.edu/files/shared/documents/wcu/WCU21-2.pdf; http://scs.cals.cornell.edu/sites/scs.cals.cornell.edu/files/shared/documents/wcu/WCU_vol22_no2.pdf). In 2015, we examined the response of soybean under high input management (~200,000 seeds/acre with a fungicide/insecticide seed treatment as well as a foliar fungicide, Priaxor, applied at 4 fluid oz. /acre on 7/31 at the R3 stage) compared with recommended input management (150,000 seeds/acre with a fungicide/insecticide seed treatment). This was part of a larger study comparing the response of all the crops in the corn-soybean-wheat/red clover rotation under conventional and organic cropping systems with recommended or high input management. We described this study in detail in a news article in the last What’s Cropping Up? issue of 2015 (https://blogs.cornell.edu/whatscroppingup/2015/11/09/soybean-yield-under-conventional-and-organic-cropping-systems-with-recommended-and-high-inputs-during-the-transition-year-to-organic/). In that article, we reported that soybean under high input management in the conventional cropping system yielded 48.6 bushels/acre, when averaged across three previous 2014 crops, compared with 44.7 bushels/acre under recommended management inputs. We did note in the previous article that despite the 9% yield increase, partial profit was not significantly different between the two treatments because the added input costs for seed and fungicide as well as the fungicide application cost offset the 3.9 bushel/acre increase for $8.50 soybeans.

Still, why did we get a yield response to high input management in the conventional cropping system? Climatic conditions were exceedingly dry from the day of fungicide application through harvest (1.4 inches of precipitation in August and 1.35 inches from September 1-20). Consequently, visually discernible disease symptoms were absent on the visible portion of soybean foliage from the R3-R8 stage. Nevertheless, because we almost never observe a response to a seeding rate of 200,000 seeds/acre compared with 150,000 seeds/acre, we speculated that perhaps the fungicide and not the higher seeding rate provided the 9% yield increase. In addition to disease control, there is some speculation that a fungicide application may improve overall soybean health, independent of disease presence.

Yield component analyses help explain why there was a yield response to high input management of soybean in the conventional cropping system in 2015. In each soybean plot (planted in 15-inch rows), we subsampled the four center rows in two 1 meter lengths (1.52 m² area) about 5 days before the 9/23 soybean harvest of the entire plot with a plot combine. We hand-harvested all the plants in the sub-sampled area and dried them, pulled off the pods and counted them, ran the pods through a stationary thrasher, counted the seeds that were thrashed, and weighed all the seeds (~3500-4500 seeds/sample or ~7000-9000 seeds/plot).

When averaged across the three previous crops of 2014, plant populations in the sub-sampled areas a few days before harvest averaged 41.7 plants/m² (~169,000 plants/acre) in the high input management treatment compared with 31.1 plants/m² (126,000 plants/acre) in the recommended management treatment (Fig.1). Our sub-sampled population was slightly lower than population measurements at the V2 stage in the high input management treatment (~174,000 plants/acre, https://blogs.cornell.edu/whatscroppingup/2015/09/16/emergence-early-v2-stage-plant-populations-and-weed-densities-r4-in-soybeans-under-conventional-and-organic-cropping-systems/). In contrast, our sub-sampled population in the recommended management input treatment was slightly higher than population measurements at the V2 stage (~122,000 plants/acre). Soybean populations of the subsampled regions immediately before harvest, however, are only 2.9 to 3.2% different than at the V2 stage so we believe that our sub-sampled measurements represent the entire plot extremely well.

When averaged across the three previous crops, soybean averaged fewer pods/plant in the high input management treatment (24.5 pods/plant in high input management compared with 35.1 in recommended input management) in the conventional cropping system (Fig.2). Typically, soybeans at higher compared with lower seeding rates produce fewer pods/plant because of less intra-plant competition for light, water, and nutrients. We have seen the same degree of reduction in pods/plant at 200,000 seeds/acre compared with 150,000 seeds/acre repeatedly in previous experiments at the Aurora Research Farm (file: aj-103-1-123.pdf; file: aj-102-4-1238.pdf).

When averaged across the three previous crops, soybean averaged more seeds/pod in the high input management treatment (2.23 seeds/pods compared with 2.09 seeds/pod in recommended input management) in the conventional cropping system (Fig.3). Furthermore, soybean averaged greater seed weight in the high input management treatment (150.4 mg compared with 144.3 mg in the recommended input management treatment) in the conventional cropping system (Fig.4). In the two previously cited studies, we did not see a seeding rate effect on seeds/pod or seed weight, which is consistent with other studies in the USA. Despite virtually zero disease pressure in 2015 because of the very dry August and first half of September conditions, could the fungicide application have resulted in more seeds/pod and seed weight because of improved plant health? Certainly an increase in seeds/pod and seed weight are the two yield components most likely to be affected by a fungicide application at the R3 stage. We did not, however, observe delayed senescence in the high input management compared with the recommended input management treatment. (It is possible that the higher plant populations offset a potential fungicide effect on delayed senescence.)

If you multiply out the yield components (plants/m² x pods/plant x seeds/pods x seed weight), the sub-sample yields averaged 51.1 bushels/acre in the high input management compared with 49.0 bushels/acre in the recommended input management treatments. The sub-sample yields were ~5-10% greater than the actual plot yields, and the difference in yield between treatments was only 4.3% instead of the 9% difference in plot yields. Nevertheless, we feel that the sub-sampled data provide us with insight on how soybean responded to high input management (fewer pods/plant with higher seeding rates and more seeds/pod and seed weight perhaps because of the fungicide application?).

Conclusions:
We will continue this study for two additional years to see if there is indeed a response to fungicide application in the presence of high seeding rates. Currently, it is pure speculation that a fungicide application at the R3 stage resulted in more seeds/pod and greater seed weight in soybean. Nevertheless, an increase in seeds/pod and seed weight would be the two most likely yield components that an R3 fungicide application would affect. As noted previously, the 9% yield advantage did not result in an increase in partial profit. Furthermore, we avoided the harvest rows when applying the fungicide application at the R3 stage. In a production field, an R3 fungicide application would probably result in some yield reduction, associated with mechanical damage of the crop, especially with spray booms less than 90-120 feet in width, reducing the magnitude of the potential yield response. We are looking forward to 2 more years of research on this topic.