Cover story: Sweet peas

By Dick Hagen
The Land Staff Writer

August 01, 2008 03:31 pm

— When you’re cranking through a few hundred acres of crops each spring, being able to plant one of those crops ahead of corn and soybeans stretches out the efficiency of both your machinery and your time.
For Mike Macik of Hector, vegetable crops have been part of his annual crop plan every year since he started farming in 1979. This year about 900 acres of his total crop are devoted to green peas and sweet corn. Even more intriguing, some of that sweet corn is double cropped immediately after the late June pea harvest.
“I’m not the greatest fan of contract farming but it is truly a great way to spread out your work load,” Macik said. Though not very competitive with corn and soybeans the past couple of years, the canners boosted their contract payment considerably to get growers this season, he said.
Macik acknowledged that canning crops don’t work for everyone, but in addition to spreading out the work load, it’s also a good rotation. He especially likes sweet corn ahead of sugar beets, “because you don’t have to battle the residue problem. Plus soil tilth and seed-to-soil contact is good with beets following sweet corn.”
Peas can handle colder temperatures, much like wheat and sugar beets. Because of a cold, wet spring this year, peas didn’t get their usual early start. Much of the Macik pea crop was planted on soils growing sugar beets last year; April 30 for the field being harvested July 10, when Macik spoke with The Land.
“But if it was the 10th of April and it was fit to go, we’d be planting peas,” he said. “Last year’s sugar beet ground is generally the first ground you get into each spring, so peas are a natural in our overall rotation.”
Prowl/Command preplant was his herbicide program for the peas. Soil preparation after sugar beets is “only a scratch, then we go in with our air seeder,” he said. “We’re careful about nitrogen. Use too much and you get too many vines so 200 to 300 pounds of a 9-23-30 is our usual appetizer for the pea crop.”
Pea harvest is a rather exacting process with frequent “tenderometer” readings taken by Seneca Foods field technicians doing the monitoring of fields. Fields are checked on a daily basis as the tenderometer score approaches desired harvest readings. “When peas are about ready to go, they may be checking fields even twice a day. We don’t always know until the big harvesting machines come rumbling in,” Macik said.
Then it’s a 16-hour run with two 8-hour shifts for the harvesting crew, or around the clock when scorching heat pushes the crop even faster.
The FMC pea harvester units cost about $400,000. They crawl through pea fields at 2 to 3 mph. An 11-foot rotating header mostly strips and vacuums the peas off the vines.
A John Deere disk and a 45-foot roller unit were virtually traveling right behind the FMC harvester the day The Land visited.
“This year we’re going right back in with an 08 maturity soybean. This double cropping doesn’t always work but with the soybean market being this strong, it’s worth the effort and the risk. Admittedly a hit and miss deal. Sometimes we don’t even cover our costs. But we do a cover crop after peas regardless; often it’s just oats. So if the soybeans don’t mature, then they become the cover crop,” Macik chuckled.
The cool, wet spring generated a good harvest on the early peas. Macik conservatively said it looked like a 3,000-pound crop but he won’t know exact yields until the October payment from Seneca Foods. Seneca Foods’ Glencoe plant is acknowledged as the largest operation in the world, although they have several other processing-canning facilities in Minnesota and elsewhere.
“I think canning crops will continue indefinitely as part of our total farming program,” Macik said. “Their value in our crop rotation is important. With soybean cyst nematodes a perennial challenge, these canning crops buffer those problems. Plus sugar beets do well for us after both sweet corn and peas. We’ve gotten very comfortable with these two crops. We like the way they stretch out our season.”

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