Bill and Greg Cotton, Hillsboro, N.D., are excited about how their wheat crop is turning out The first field they combined this week averaged 95 bushels per acre and the sample they took into the elevator was nearly 16% protein. The test weight was over 62 pounds.

“We are looking at $6 per bushel compared a $2.40 a bushel for a low protein, light weight sample that elevator had just done for the truck ahead of me,” Bill says.

That kind of wheat isn’t a fluke for the Cotton brothers, who raise spring wheat, sugarbeets, corn, soybeans and dry beans in the Red River Valley.

Greg (right) and Bill Cotton are intensively managing spring wheat.

Since 2004 they have been following an intensive wheat management plan. AgriTrend, Winnipeg, MB, is their current agronomy advisors and the Cottons have high praise for the advice the company has given them.

The Cottons plant high-yielding, strong-strawed varieties. They aren’t concerned with the varieties’ disease resistance traits because they know they will apply fungicide, no matter what the weather conditions. They more than double the typical seeding rate. They split up their N rate between what they can put on at seeding and two stream-bar applications during the growing season. They apply fungicides three times each season – once with the herbicide, once when the flag leaf emerges and once at heading.

“It’s not any one thing we do (that results in high yield and high protein wheat),” Greg says. “It’s everything together.”

Intensive wheat management isn’t easy, though. The Cottons spray wheat almost constantly through the summer. Sometimes they work 20-24 hours a day to get N on before a rain.

The bothers invested a significant amount of money in water tanker semis, big sprayers and on-farm liquid fertilizer storage tanks to make the job more manageable. They employ five people over the summer who are expert truck and tractor operators, Greg says. It takes a well-coordinated team on the farm and good commercial suppliers to get all on the inputs applied in a timely manner.

But the Cottons agree that it is worth the extra effort and investment.

“We make money on wheat,” Bill says.