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Refining dry bean fertility practices

A four-year research project evaluated two ways to potentially improve dry bean yields: narrower row widths and in-crop fertilization.

Growers in southern Alberta continue to find lots to like about dry bean production. When production, price and markets all come together, it’s a beautiful thing.

Over the past decade, bean growers have maintained an acreage range of 35,000 to 55,000 acres. As Doon Pauly explains, this range is largely determined by market factors, not by a reluctance of producers to grow more.

“I believe bean acres are stable around 50,000 acres because that is about the capacity of our current bean storage, cleaning, packaging and marketing system,” said Pauly, Lethbridge-based Agronomy Research Scientist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry.

Pauly has been working on dry bean agronomy from many different angles since 2012. From 2014 to 2018, with funding from Alberta Pulse Growers and others, he looked at whether changes to conventional row spacing and fertilization in dry beans could improve yields. Provided dry bean infrastructure and systems expanded proportionally, farmers and industry could then share a larger revenue pie.

“Some recent years, bean prices were strong and production was good so beans were a valuable part of producers’ rotations,” said Pauly. “Even though current production systems are working well, we still wonder if alternative practices might have benefits.”

Could narrower rows, in-crop fertilizer boost yields?

Most bean growers fertilize prior to seeding with 55-cm (22-inch) row spacing planters. In theory, based on other crops, Pauly thought narrower rows with more plants per acre should boost per-acre yields. Secondly, he surmised that applying fertilizer in-crop rather than just at seeding time might push yields without causing unproductive biomass.

Pauly’s work has shown that higher bean yields are attainable with the increased per-acre plant populations that are possible with row spacing narrower than current industry practices. However, in-crop fertilizer application timing did little to influence yield, even though dry beans respond positively to nitrogen.

“I think after three years of research, we can say that in-crop fertilization in beans is not a strategy that should be used,” Pauly said. “There was just no benefit to it.”

Pauly maintains the conventional approach of putting fertilizer down around seeding time is better than trying to hit the perfect application timing in-crop.

Although he did see improvement in bean yields with narrower rows, this insight doesn’t provide an easy fix for growers. Today’s standard 55-cm row spacing works because producers are growing beans and sugar beets on the same land, and sugar beet planters use this row spacing.

“It’s my view that if we’re going to see a jump in bean productivity, I think we have to move to narrower row spacing,” Pauly said. “Then, it becomes an engineering problem to come up with a harvesting system that works.”