canary grass to winter wheat?

Reed Canary grass tends to colonize wet areas or areas that may be seasonally wet so that may be a deal breaker for winter wheat, particularly in the spring. Other than that, RC develops a very extensive root system and can reproduce by underground rhizomes that can be very persistent, just like quackgrass. So without seeing what you have in mind I would suggest some process such as fallow tillage to weaken and suppress the root system. Otherwise your wheat may be overrun by RC in the spring. At any rate, I would not suggest disking alone. Unless you have a heavy disk it is going to take a lot of passes to break down the RC. I would plow first, then disk.

If you cut the RC, I assume you mean a mature crop, you will need a very heavy no-till planter to cut the residue and place the seed. And, the cut herbage may tend to drag along and pile in front of the planter. Just a heads up, I may be picturing a worst case situation.

One other thing, the RC itself is suppressing less aggressive weeds. So a disking that opens the soil will also make other weed seeds in the seed bank more competitive. So you could end up with not only RC but a flush of new weeds as well. You might want to try a few different approaches on small areas before you go after the whole field.

I have obtained decent control over rhizomatous grasses by discing, cultivating, discing again, cultivating twice, harrowing a couple times, cultivating again, harrowing, then planting a weed competative crop that is tall and I can cultivate. In other words, many passes over a period of about a month (luckily the weather cooperated with this). Kinda a short fallow… Even after all that, I still have weeds, esp between the plants in the rows. Still, it was enough weed control that the sunflowers I planted got a good jump on them. The variety I picked got to 8-10 feet tall, and the weeds soon had no sunlight. Until they got tall, I could knock the weeds back between the rows by cultivating. With wheat you get neither of these advantages (not tall and not normally in rows)…

Like Kevin, I have had good luck discing some and planting oats. I have also had good luck with turnips and on my ground, and found them to be very weed competative. The best crop I have planted in weedy ground, by far, is rye. It will take over, though, and it does so very early in spring when the ground is too wet to work. It got away from me last time I planted it, went to seed, and I am still cleaning up some of the volunteers. If you can find something to do with it, that would be an awesome grain to grow. If there was a grain I could imagine growing well in a min till organic system, it would be rye. I also tried triticale too, but on my land I found it to be a much weaker competitor than rye. This is the main reason I didn’t try wheat, because if it was an even weaker competitor than triticale (which I have read it is) than it has no chance. Reguardless of what you grow, you will have to decide what your weed tolerance is or should be for the crops you are interested in. In my situation, with the crops I grow, I have decided that my weed tolerance is not zero. Like I said, I haven’t had the guts to even try wheat at this point. Instead, I have decided to grow weed competative crops, or at least crops I can cultivate, until the weed pressure on my ground is reduced (if this ever happens). I hope this helps…

Jarrod
I tried what you are suggesting with planting spring oats into a “failed” Timothy/red clover planting and ended up grazing the whole thing because it was so polluted with Timothy. The sheep didn’t think it was a failure 🙂

A broader comment on no-till grain production:
I know a farmer in my area who drills winter rye into his pastures in September. He has the cattle graze the pastures down hard before seeding for vegetation control, and the rye usually takes well. He uses the rye for high quality late-fall / early spring rather than grain, however.

In general, its hard to imagine how any mulch (less than a foot deep) or crop competition is going to stop or slow down cool season grasses in the spring in the northeast, they grow like gangbusters in May and June.

In Australia, many farmers use “no-kill cropping” by overseeding small grains on warm season pastures. No herbicides, no tillage, just a seed-drill. Their winters are much milder than ours, so the grains are able to grow all winter while the summer grasses are dormant, this is obviously not going to be possible here.

I do agree that planting a variety of crops will yield better results rather than focusing on only one crop at a time. This is why we plant not only up to ten grains a year, but also vegetables, chickens, lamb, beef, pork, and just about anything else that seems crazy enough to try. Our farm is very diversified, but I have seen that being too spread out can mean you do many things poorly rather than a few things well. I also consider that I only 30 -35 times to try my hand at growing crops. Each year I make a big mistake and have a crop failure is another year I have to wait to get another chance. Because we are talking about time on an annular scale I am not always willing to take risks, because I litteraly can’t afford to have even a 25% learning curve. I am all for experimentation but on our farm it is balanced with respect for what has worked for many, many seasons. We don’t farm in a bubble. Look around at your neighbors what works for them, what was done historically in your area. I don’t think it is good it get locked into “the way it has always been done,” but I have already made enough mistakes, like grain fields that yield 500#/ac, to have come back to some common sense ways of farming.

I’ve thought about using grazing to assist in terminating rye, but you’d have to wait until its fairly tall or else grazing will do very little to actually kill the plant, and may just make it more vigorous. Grazing vegetative wheat that is destined to be harvested for grain has been common in various areas at various times, and when the animals are removed before the stem elongates, it may not harm yields at all. This is a subject that I recall tevis being knowledgeable about.

Rye is killed relatively easily by mowing (or rolling) once it starts to shed pollen, but at that point, it wouldn’t be very palatable to the animals.

I’d be willing to guess that grazing it hard around boot stage could substitute for some, though not all, tillage on the rye.
I guess we’ll just have to try it.