🌾 Spring wheat
A spring cereal that suffers foot rot after barley and rye. Oat and a legume break that cycle.
Sowing
Sow it as a spring cereal into a worked seedbed. If rye should follow the same autumn, VYR says the field should preferably be free from mid-August. Spring wheat is often too late for that.
Soil and parcel
Avoid a parcel that had barley, wheat or rye the year before: foot-rot diseases increase (Luke, aoe.fi).
Fertilising
Pea as a preceding crop lowers cereal disease pressure and leaves nitrogen. Luke puts that effect at roughly 20–30 kg/ha. Wheat's own rate depends on the parcel and is not one number here.
Yield and harvest
Thresh when ripe. A late harvest makes winter rye on the same parcel difficult (VYR).
🔄 In the rotation
- Role
- A cereal that gains more from a break crop than oat does.
- Good preceding crop
- Oat breaks foot rot (aoe.fi, Luke). A legume or an oilseed is a good preceding crop.
- Good following crop
- Not straight into more wheat or barley. VYR: rye is sown after spring wheat, but the parcel is freed late.
- Gap on the same parcel
- Not back to back with barley, wheat or rye. Five cereal years in a row is cereal monoculture (Luke 2025).
Other crops
Sources
- Viljelykierrot – oppimateriaali (Avointen oppimateriaalien kirjasto aoe.fi)
- Luke (MTT): Viljan tyvitautien esiintyminen Etelä-Suomessa
- VYR: Mallasohran viljelyopas – muokkaus, kylvö, lannoitus
- Luke: Herneen viljelyopas (Hukka-hanke, 2022)
Links open public guides. Always check your own contract and parcel advice.
General rotation advice – not a substitute for advice, a contract or the law. Figures come from the sources, not from invention.