Ag Weather Impacts-Planting Peas

Ag Weather Impacts-Planting Peas

It's pea planting time in the Adams, Oregon area. Yesterday, I talked with Berk Davis, a 3rd generation green pea grower about planting weather:

Berk: In this area we're just getting started. Things are a little late. If the nights are pushing freezing, they don't like to come out of the ground. They're just like anything. We need a certain amount of heat units to make these "babies" grow.

He also talked about how going to no-till over 15 years ago has helped overcome some of the adverse weather during planting.,

Berk: Kept it from crusting and of course if you leave that stubble on the field it's kind of a blanket. One year, I starting doing ground temperatures in March. The no-till doesn't warm up as much because you don't have the black ground, but what we found was in the no-till with the cover we didn't get the spikes. So, actually the soil temperatures, if you figured the degrees over a 30 day period, we actually had more warmth in our no-till than we did in the conventional tillage.

Berk outlined the ideal growing conditions for green peas:

Berk: If we get the moisture at the right time, we can grow just as good of dry-land peas as we can irrigated. Once it starts getting warm, we've got to get the degree-days to get the peas up and get them growing.

Thanks to Berk Davis for sharing his expertise in growing green peas. We hope to check back with Berk later in the growing season.

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