Tim Norris, who hails from “No-Till Capital of the World” Knox County, Ohio, is seeing the benefits of adding wheat back into his corn and soybean rotation

“It’s allowed me to focus  on repairing and improving my farms, and I feel it allows me to focus on that in the right season,” Norris says. “Not only the right season for me to do the work, but the right season to get the best results possible.”

More Time, More Benefits

Prior to 2021, wheat was not always part of Norris’ operation. Some years, he did not plant it due to time constraints, especially when it came to juggling planting with his precision agriculture business. In addition to running a profitable business full time, he was farming 450 acres of his own and doing custom work on another 400 acres.

“Fall was always busy for me with harvest,” Norris says. “We also did about 40,000 acres a year of grid soil sampling in the fall, and so I had to oversee that. I didn’t have time to get wheat planted.”

The threat of Fusarium head blight also kept him from planting. 

“I had heard some horror stories about people having head scab wheat that is sprouting,” Norris says. “No one wanted to buy the wheat because of the head scab or the sprouting or they discounted it so much that they didn’t make any money on it. That had me concerned.”

It was the need to improve his fields that spurred him…