Prairie Farm Report: Hybrid Fall Rye Crop Story.

[AgrivilleAdmin]

Any experience or thoughts on this crop opportunity?

[Ache4Acres]

Ok I'll bite...lemme guess...a new propriety hybrid cereal grain where I can't grow my own seed.

[stonepicker]

Looks interesting, reading other reports on hybrid rye it sounds like it responds very well to high intensive farming, (if a farmer wants to go that way ) Good to see another option for fall seeded crops.

[jamesb]

There are I think 2 or 3 hybrid rye varieties available now. It does yield quite a bit better than conventional varieties but you must throw the nutrients at it to get the yield bump. From what I understand seed cost in the fall of 2016 were $65 per acre. By my way of thinking at $5 rye the hybrids make sense, but at $3.70 rye, the first 17.5 bushels per acre will just go to pay for seed.
For many traditional rye growers, rye was usually planted on lesser quality land where rye would do better than other crops. I am told to get the max benefit from growing hybrid rye one should grow it on ones better land.

[seedsman]

I have a little bit of experience with Guttino, another hybrid rye from the same breeding company in Germany. Seed cost is definitely something to consider, so you want to be sure to treat the crop like any other crop that has high potential returns. Compared to tradition rye varieties, it is much higher yielding, has much better straw strength, is much shorter and has falling number about 100 points higher. Compared to winter wheat, it has much better winter hardiness. In our case, it outyielded the winter wheat by a large margin. Finding markets for large volumes of rye may be a problem in the short term.

[MBgrower]

A fellow i know who grows rye in w. Mb says hydrids yeilding sometimes over 100 bpa, doing quite a bit better than non hybrids, but said price of rye has slumped , just a little better than the price of oats due to increased production and lack of milling markets.

[westernvicki]

Finding profitable markets for rye is the bigger problem, indeed.