[Mr. Lucky]

In my part of the corn belt, winter wheat was traditionally planted in a corn-beans-wheat three year rotation. The market price of wheat generally doesn't justify it as a crop, but it's heavily subsidized and the wheat stubble added tilth to the soil. Soybeans being a legume, much of the nitrogen requirement of the wheat was provided by carry-over, so the input cost of raising wheat wasn't all that much.

But farmers have moved away from intensive tillage and don't really need the wheat stubble to maintain soil tilth on their better ground. With the input cost of nitrogen drifting so high, many farmer have dropped wheat from the rotation and have gone to a corn-beans two year rotation, allowing the nitrogen carry-over from the bean crop to reduce the anhydrous ammonia required to fertilize the corn crop.

On the other hand, to the extent that taking wheat out a rotation creates a sort of vacuum in the marketplace, you can expect that vacuum to be filled by the planting of wheat on more marginal ground less suitable for soybeans and corn (which is how the marketplace should work).

[lfrancis]

Quite of few of my neighbors and I have gone to mostly a wheat-soybean rotation. Corn is too expensive to plant, fertilizer is way high let alone seed corn, for the price. I couldn’t plant wheat this fall because of the weather. I couldn’t get the beans off till November a lot of guys were in the same situation around here.

I no-till.