Most growers are past the time of grappling on whether to plant more corn or soybean acres this spring.
For Ohio farmer Doug Justison, he plants both - together.
Since 2016, Justison has been experimenting with intercropping corn and soybeans in 20-foot strips right next to each other. He's the first to admit that it's not for everyone, but the results on his farm can't be ignored.
"For me, it's a 60-bushel-yield gain [in corn] in a bad year," he says. "In good years with some rain in August, it's an 80- to 100-bushel improvement versus what I was doing and versus what my neighbors next to me were seeing with their crops."
Justison farms a few hundred acres in eastern Ohio, about 5 miles from the Pennsylvania state line. He farms mostly hillside terrain characterized by thin soils that can easily erode.
"The primary goal was to grow more corn per acre. My secondary goal was to help preserve the soil and minimize any erosion potential," he says. "I had been farming in 160- to 240-wide strips, sort of a traditional strip cropping, contour cropping system to try to minimize erosion. Our soils are very thin, very poor water infiltration. They don't hold a lot of water, so that was the secondary reason."
He started intercropping on just a few acres. But after a successful first year, he went full tilt in 2017. Now, all his corn and soybeans are intercropped.
No secrets, a lot of details
Justison says there is nothing secret about his success, but some things have been critical.
The first is having the right equipment. He uses plants in 20-foot strips using a John Deere 1760 8-row planter. His John Deere 7720 combine has 20-foot headers.
The biggest change he's made was replacing his 60-foot sprayer with a 20-foot machine.
Planning well in advance is another key, he says. The whole idea behind intercropping is allowing more sunlight to penetrate the corn rows to drive higher yields. The potential trade-off is lower soybean yields because of shading from the taller corn plants. There are many factors to think about, like how to handle fertility, herbicide use and more.
For Justison, it starts with the right amount of seed.
"For this system to really work, we need to push corn populations," he says. "Outside-row corn can easily be at 50,000 seeds an acre. I've used pops of 50K, 52K, 55K, 60K, 62K and 72K on outside rows. The 72K was the only failure," he says.
For herbicide and fungicide spraying, traited crops make weed control easier and more forgiving.
"Enlist E3 between corn and beans makes weed control very safe, easy and effective," Justison says. "Otherwise, I've had some conventional corn, and it wasn't the same herbicide platform as the beans, and it gets tiring and difficult to cut a fine edge every 20 feet. So, having the same herbicide platform is important."
On fertility, he says he hasn't had to change much. Since he farms thin soils, he usually broadcasts phosphorus and potassium in spring as replacement nutrition. He also splits his sidedress nitrogen in early summer.
Another thing he does is create "tramlines" in the soybean blocks for easier access to the corn. This allows him to take his three-point-mounted spray boom into the field to apply foliar fungicide on tasseled corn.
"Within that 20-foot-wide soybean strip, planted in 15-inch rows, I put tramlines in the middle of the strip where I essentially shut two rows off as I plant in one direction, and then I come back and have them turned on, but it leaves a 30-inch gap," Justison says. "Instead of 15-inch-row beans, I have basically a place to drive my tractor that I use for spraying through the soybeans. I'm missing a row of soybeans, but I'm bumping the population on the row next to them.
"It's a low-tech solution to being able to spray tasseled corn with fungicide when getting an airplane or helicopter is not a good option," Justison adds.
Yields soar, with trade-offs
The first year, Justison's intercropped corn yields jumped 60 bushels from 180 to 240 bushels.
In 2023, a banner year, he saw corn yields well over 300 bushels in some fields - with one field averaging 346 bushels.
But there's a trade-off: lower soybean yields, which Justison says average between 3 and 5 bushels less an acre each year.
Are the higher corn yields enough to offset his soybean loss? "Absolutely."
"The soybean loss in a three-crop rotation was almost nothing," Justison says. "Two-crop rotation, you get a little more shading effect on the soybean strip, so there is a little bit of loss with it. But it's an easy trade-off for more corn."
After doing this for nine seasons, he is convinced that his higher yields come from the edge rows.
"The more manicured edge rows you have that have close to 100% perfect weed control, the better off you're going to be," Justison says. "The sprayer pass and herbicide programs that you use for the weed control, it's pretty critical to keep the outside row perfectly clean of any weed competition."
He admits, though, to many challenges producers would need to overcome to make it work.
Justison says his fields have been 100% no-till for many years. The 200- to 300-bushel corn environment leaves a lot of fodder to cut through, which is not a good environment for soybeans to start off. He plants corn first, but he must wait a week to 10 days to plant his beans.
Harvest is also a challenge.
"Because there is a growing crop next to you, you can't unload on the go, which could be a problem on some large acres," Justison says. "Everything is handled at the end of the strip. For me, the small combine has worked well, just unloading after every strip or every two strips in the corn. You really can't unload on the go, and the carts need to be staged at the end of the strips."
He says his system goes contrary to the direction American agriculture has been going in recent years, with farms getting larger and equipment getting larger to accommodate the growth.
"Until we have smaller, more autonomous-type equipment, the guy that's running two 12-row corn headers in the fall, this system's not going to be a natural thing or an easy thing for them to consider," Justison says.
But he has no intent of going back.
"If someone wants to grow a lot more corn per acre, it is a system to do that. But you've got to have the right-sized equipment to make it work," Justison says.
