Farming on The Edge | Strip Intercropping Edges Capture More Light, Reward With Higher Yields

Try a sunlight portal

Do your own on-farm test and create a single sunlight portal midfield to assess strip intercropping on your operation, suggests Bob Recker, owner of Cedar Valley Innovation, a Waterloo, IA, and strip-intercropping enthusiast.

Deliberate fallow rectangles in the middle of a cornfield are one way to document the yield boost of added sunlight on corn. Such “sunlight portals” –measuring one row to four rows wide – have boosted single-row corn yields as high as 280 bu./acre, says Recker.

By increasing single-row populations up to the equivalent of 60,000/acre, corn-portal-facing single-row yields have topped 380 bu./acre, compared to 270 bu. on the next row away from the edge, according to Recker’s portal studies.

 He calculates these acre-equivalent yields in the single row facing the sunlight portal, and extrapolates the data to meaningful per-acre yield figures.