Cropping Combinations of Winter Wheat with Sorghum, Maize or Soybean for Ethanol Feedstock, Silage or Grain Production.

Winter wheat is a valuable cover crop in Indiana, where 300,000 acres were grown in the last season. Producers can diversify their production systems in Indiana by harvesting winter wheat at boot growth stage (1) as green chop animal feed, at mid grain fill (2) to be ensiled, or at grain maturity (3). At each wheat harvest we studied several options for a second crop: soybean for grain, corn for grain or silage, sorghum for grain or silage; and sweet sorghum for silage. There were fifteen treatments planted into wheat stubble (WS) and five bare-ground control (BG) treatments.  This experiment compared each of these crop combinations for agronomic productivity: dry matter yield and feed quality, or grain yield. Silages were ensiled in lab-scale silos for ninety days. The green chop and ensiled products were then evaluated for feed quality by analyzing NDF, ADF, cellulose, lignin, ash, crude protein, and ensiled aerobic stability. This is the final year of a three-year study at the Agronomy Center for Research and Education at West Lafayette, Indiana. In 2009, grain yield of two wheat cultivars and one triticale line were 56, 65 and 64 bu/a.  Triticale produced the most straw biomass: 1.8 T/a. Corn grain from the first planting date seeded into bare ground yielded 172 bu/a where 1WS yielded 148 bu/a. Soybean yielded 48 (1BG), 46 (1WS), 45 (2WS), and 22 (3WS) bu/a. Silage maize, sweet and silage sorghum from each planting date all produced high quality and aerobically stable silages. Silage corn produced the most total biomass: 8.1 and 6.8 dry T/a for 1BG and 1WS, respectively.  Each crop was managed as appropriate for its optimal production in Indiana, and the economic return for all crop combinations was analyzed.