Farming Video | Double Cropping Wheat with Sesame: A Heat-Tolerant Solution

21 Jun 252m 13s

In this video, Todd Kimbrell shares his experience growing sesame as a double crop following wheat in the hot, dry conditions south of Dallas–Fort Worth. With wheat prices low and soybeans unable to handle the intense summer heat, sesame offers a promising option thanks to its heat and drought tolerance. Todd talks through the challenges and opportunities of this rotation strategy, including his focus on weed control and squeezing extra dollars out of wheat stubble. It’s a practical look at how creative cropping can make tough conditions profitable.

00:00:00 Hey guys, lane miles here. We're here, uh, kind of south, I guess you we'd say south of Dallas, south Fort Worth area. 00:00:06 And uh, Todd, you were telling us earlier about, you know, some stuff you were growing, which most 00:00:09 of it sounded pretty normal then you, you kind of hit the spot for me. 'cause I, I enjoy a good cheeseburger. Right. 00:00:15 And I really, really like a hamburger bone with sesame on it. Yeah, me too. So 00:00:19 You told us you grew sesame. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so we've kind 00:00:23 of gotten away from our wheat rotation here, but we're planting a lot of corn. So I knew that we needed 00:00:29 to get back the wheat back into the rotation just for rotation purposes only. But wheat's cheap. Wheat's terribly cheap. 00:00:35 It's hard to make it work on paper. Matter of fact, it really don't work even with the really good crop that we've had this year. 00:00:41 It's not a big money maker. I tasked myself, how do we squeeze a little more outta this wheat just to force it back into our rotation and double crop. 00:00:51 Everybody says double crop. You talk to anybody north of here, why don't you plant beans in it? 00:00:54 Well, we get too hot for beans. Beans will absolutely burn up. It gets extremely hot here. So what crop will handle it? 00:01:02 And that's what kind of how it came to sesame. Uh, it's extremely heat and drought tolerant. So why not? Let's try some sesame in this wheat stubble 00:01:10 and see what we can, you know, to me it's a goal just to squeeze a few dollars outta wheat. Right. A few more dollars outta wheat. Absolutely. 00:01:16 So that's kind how we ended up there. Well, I mean that makes, that makes a whole lot of sense to us because, I mean, we plant, 00:01:20 you know, we don't plant a whole lot of wheat. 'cause like you said, when the dollars don't work out. Mm-hmm. You know, normally if we gotta get a decent crop on 00:01:25 the beans to make any money. That's right. Well, if you can't make the money, might as well not do it. 00:01:29 So if you can make some money on some sesame Yep. Might need to try that at home. Well, and I would love nothing more than to be able 00:01:36 to grow soybeans here. I they'd be a great rotation and especially if we could do it in our wheat stubble, it wouldn't be anything better, but it just 00:01:42 gets flat out too hot. Yeah. I mean, I don't even know if it'd work one outta 10 years here. 00:01:47 So what crop can handle heat more than anything? Most anything else. And the answer is sesame from what I've gathered in researching it. 00:01:55 So hopefully we can get it going. I'm a little concerned about weed control in it. That'll be the biggest challenge. 00:02:01 But we're gonna see what happens. Hey, if you don't try, you don't know. That's right. I'm excited because I'm gonna keep eating them Cheeseburger. 68 00:02:07.375 --> 00:02:08.335