Farming Video | Surprising Recovery: Flooded Soybeans Still Hanging On
Matt Miles and Jacob Appleberry revisit a soybean field that was hit hard back in spring—where water covered the mid-March-planted beans for nearly a week. At the time, they debated whether to replant or gamble on what was left. Months later, they’re surprised by how well the surviving plants have bounced back. Some may not be pretty, but they’re still yielding. Matt and Jacob break down the plant structure differences between the flood-damaged and undamaged areas, sharing insights on plant compensation, spacing, and taproot development.
00:00:00 So guys, you remember in April, uh, Jacob and I were out here and we're doing videos on these beans. This is the beans we planted in mid-March 00:00:07 that ended up getting, I don't know, two foot, three foot of water over the top of 'em, four or five days. 00:00:13 Where we're standing now is where we thought we had the really bad problems. The field above it, ditches couldn't hold the water. 00:00:19 All the water came across, washed across the rows washed. We thought pretty much, pretty much one row completely out. 00:00:27 Yes. Um, you know, we were trying to do the math. Is it worth planting? Is it worth replanting? Because we were gonna be two 00:00:33 to three weeks later on either half the field or destroy the whole field and start back over, which always causes 00:00:39 yields, yield problems. From there, we decided to keep 'em. Uh, really wasn't sure what was gonna happen 00:00:44 and I broke that right at the ground, but this plant was actually sitting in there like that. So this is one of the plants 00:00:50 that we thought probably would never even make it right. You know, it break its neck or whatever. 00:00:54 Figured it's made it to time for desiccation. Uh, it's got a few beans on it. It is not the best looking plant in the world, 00:01:00 but I mean, this is probably a, you know, if we all the plants look like that, it'd probably be a 50, 60 bushel plant, right? 00:01:06 These were the plants we didn't even think we were gonna have, and we're gonna end up with about 65 00:01:10 to 70,000 on one side of the road. So Jacob's got in his hand, tell 'em what you got, Jacob. These were the, what we'll call the normal plants 00:01:18 where they were sitting on each side of the twin row. Um, you know, the, the nine or six and a half inches apart. Like they normally sit off your planter, um, 00:01:25 sitting just like that and they've got a decent load on them. You know, they're, they're ready to desiccate as well. 00:01:31 Um, if you hold them, these were the plants that were sitting on what we'll call the high side of the road that didn't get washed off, like, 00:01:40 or washed down like those plants did. Similar to a single row Plant, similar to a single row plant. 00:01:44 These were actually sitting a little bit closer together, but whenever you start looking at the, the number 00:01:49 of nodes are basically the same, might be one node difference, but when you start looking at the number of, um, pods, 00:01:55 pods per racing and your number of laterals, these, these particular ones, you know, compensated significantly for what was lacking on the side 00:02:04 of the twin road that we lost. Yeah. And then when you look at the root system, you know, there's a, there's a lot more dense root system, 00:02:10 a lot better taproot and all that on, on both these plants that were sitting up here on the high side. 00:02:14 Not to necessarily say that twin rows better, but what we're looking at more than anything is we got some compensation outta these beans 00:02:20 because they had a little bit more elbow room, more room to Grow. Right? A little bit less population, 00:02:23 which what, you know, what people see all the time. Exactly. So guys, this is just kind of a pre-harvest video to what we talked to you about back in the, 00:02:31 back in the spring when we wasn't sure what to do. Yes, we decided to go this way. Leave them, you know, and see what happened. 00:02:37 We'll have a desiccation probably coming here next week, so 14 days we'll be cutting these. 00:02:42 We'll be able to compare the beans we left to beans that weren't damaged and we'll be able to compare the ones that went underwater 00:02:48 for five days stayed underwater five days that they were about V two probably, if I remember correctly, when 00:02:55 That happened, right? They, they weren't very Old. Stay, stay tuned. 00:02:57 We'll get you a third video outta this 00:02:59.505 --> 00:03:01.965