Wheat
by Jacob Koke
About Wheat
There are two main types of wheat. Those types are winter wheat and spring wheat. Winter wheat is planted in the fall and harvested in mid-May and spring wheat is planted in spring and harvested in the fall. In Iowa we use spring wheat more often because of our weather pattern. Then wheat is further broken down into soft wheat and durum. Soft wheat is high in glucose and is used for crackers and bread and durum wheat is used for making pastas and noodles.
Wheat is made up of a root and shoot system. Two types of roots are found, the seminal roots and the nodal roots (adventitious or crown roots), which arise from the lower nodes of the shoot. The shoot is made up of a series of repeating units or phytomers, each potentially having a node, a leaf, an elongated internode and a bud in the axil of the leaf.
The growing stages of wheat are germination/seedling emergence, tillering, stem elongation, boot, heading/anthesis, and grain-fill/ripening. Harvest at 15 percent moisture.
Grasshoppers are popular pests that are problems for wheat. The easiest way to get rid of grasshoppers is to do a crop rotation which is a cultural control.
Harvesting wheat started with sickles slowly advanced to horse drawn harvesters made by McCormick and then from there were slowly advanced to better machine to better machine to the combine that we have now.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/006/y4011e/y4011e05.htm