South Dakota corn and soybean growers should consider growing wheat in 2009, say SDSU specialists.

The price has been good and there's the potential to save money in pesticide and herbicides costs by having a more diverse crop rotation, says SDSU small grains pathologist Jeff Stein.

"The addition of another crop into a rotation can be beneficial in terms of disease and pest management because you're including a host that the pests and pathogens can't use," Stein says. "It allows you to disrupt their life cycles a little bit. In particular, this can cause the populations of soil-borne plant pathogens to drop. The more crops in a rotation, the less chance you'll have of pests of a certain type building up to where they'll cause a lot of damage."

SDSU winter wheat breeder Bill Berzonsky says that including winter wheat in rotations also helps spread the workload, since the crop is seeded in the fall. Winter wheat also takes advantage of fall moisture. Good growth in spring can shade out grassy weeds so that it might not be as necessary to use some herbicides.

More than 243,000 acres of wheat were planted in southeast South Dakota in 2007, the most since the 1930s.

Wheat acres in the South Dakota topped 3.66 million in 2008 - the highest since 1997.

Source: SDSU AgBio Communications