What Will Replace the Corn-Soybean Rotation?

While it's premature to proclaim the demise of the corn-soybean rotation, many agronomists and economists, with an eye toward increasing demand for corn to produce fuel, believe that the corn-soybean rotation will decrease in importance in the U.S. This is expected to occur as higher-yielding grass crops gain in area at the expense of lower-yielding oilseed and protein crops such as soybean. I will present data from some of our crop rotation trials, including corn-corn-soybean, corn-soybean-wheat, and continuous corn rotations, in comparison to corn-soybean. Questions to address will include whether or not moving away from the corn-soybean rotation will decrease yield stability, and what management factors will change as we make this shift.

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Emerson NafzigerProfessor of Crop Sciences
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ednaf@uiuc.edu


Dr. Emerson Nafziger is Professor of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He grew up on a crop-livestock farm in northwest Ohio, and earned degrees in agronomy from The Ohio State University, Purdue University, and the University of Illinois. Since 1982 he has done research and extension on management of corn, soybean, wheat, rotations, and tillage in Illinois.