Row Width Reduction

Don Morishita, the Kimberly center superintendent and a weed scientist updated me me about research studies exploring new planting methods to reduce spacing between rows of dry beans from 22 inches to 7.5 inches. "We are trying to take a page from the soybean growers book of planting the dry beans on narrower rows, 7.5 inch row spacing and see how the weeds respond to that. With soybeans, of course the weed interference or weed competition is greatly reduced by these narrow rose as one might expect and along with that is another study where we are looking at the ideal population of beans that you should plant at if you are going with these narrow rows because if you plant with the same population as with the 22 inch rows, it is a much sparser or much more wide open plant population than if you go with a higher seeding rate which makes sense because we are going from 22 inch rows to the 7 1/2 inch rows. Let me ask you, Don, if you are going to 7 1/2 inch rows and you get narrower spacing it would seem to me that you would increase yield because you get more plants per square inch. So why would you have wider rows in the first place is it because of machinery? Yes, harvesting is the biggest thing so historically, the way that beans have been harvested here in Idaho, they are actually undercut and then put in a wind row and then they dry down and a grower will come in with a harvester that has a pickup unit on it that will pick these beings that are in a wind row compared to soy beans where it is all direct cut."