Great Bend Tribune
Published April 29, 2018
Before today’s topic we can take a moment to celebrate some rain. Depending on where you live in the area, rainfall over the last two weeks totaled between one and two inches. So what did that do to our drought status? Nothing really. The latest map is as of Tuesday, April 24 but even if you include the rain after that date, the area is still in the depths of an extreme drought. The rains have helped provide surface soil moisture but the subsoil is still extremely dry in most areas and it won’t take much heat and wind to deplete that. Fortunately temperatures are predicted to be normal. Unfortunately, precipitation is expected to be normal to below normal.
Last weekend’s column by Alicia Boor, ANR Extension Agent, discussed potential freeze damage and wheat. It used terms for growth such as Feekes stage 5 or 6 along with a bit of a description. These terms are basically meaningless to many not in the business and even for some in it. We also use terms like tillering and jointing which are useful to producers but again not terribly useful to the layman. Each profession or industry has its own language and jargon – perfectly intelligible to the group and not so much to outsiders. Today, let’s take a moment to decode the language of crop plant growth, at least for wheat.
In wheat growth staging, the Feekes scale is commonly used. Feekes was a Dutch agronomist who developed this scale in the early 1940s. There are other, better scales but this is the one in common usage. So briefly, what does it tell you?
- Without becoming too boring, this is a numerical scale with decimal subdivisions from head (flower) emergence through maturity. Some add decimal subdivisions during tillering (the addition of shoots to the main shoot).
- Stage 1 is emergence where the coleoptile emerges from the ground.
- Stages 2 and 3 are tillering. This is the addition to side or axillary shoots to the main shoot. Not all of these tillers typically produce grain. At Stage 3 tillering is complete.
- Stages 4 and 5 are greening up of the wheat at the end of winter. At Stage 4, wheat growth becomes erect, vertical, whereas earlier it was prostrate, horizontal. Stage 5 can only take place after the plant has experienced sufficient cold, vernalization. This is where head size, potential yield, is determined and any tillers formed after this pint won’t produce heads.
- Stage 6 is jointing or the appearance of the first node also termed hollow stem. Here the developing head which has been beneath the soil surface emerges and is susceptible to damage from cold temperatures.
- At Stage 7 two nodes are visible. The flag leaf, the uppermost leaf, emerges at Stage 8. This is the stage where producers typically must make decisions regarding fungicide application.
- Stage 9 is where the flag leaf is fully emerged. Stage 10 is the boot stage where the head is above the flag leaf but hasn’t yet emerged. This is where the decimals are used and Stage 10.5.1 is where flowering begins and 10.5.4 is where seed ripening begins.
- Stage 11 is the ripening process and at 11.4 the seed is ready for harvest.