Comment by 9rx
11 hours ago
> Hell, the yield on such a small lot (it'll mostly be end rows) will be terrible.
One of my fields has a creek in the corner that divides just two acres from the rest of the field. I've never noticed any meaningful yield drag in that part.
Perhaps your soil is more fertile in that area? It's not uncommon to see a 25% drop in acreage on the border of fields due to trees, end rows etc.
25% would be quite extreme. There is some evidence of that much loss on individual rows being possible, but not the entire headland. 10% is considered to be more typical, which works out to be around a 4% loss across the entire piece. Which is well within the normal range of field variability, so it is ultimately not noticeable.
Of course, if it were a 5 acre field, with some assumptions about its shape, we'd only be talking more like a 2% loss across the entire field. Not nothing, but terrible...?
Year-to-year variability will see much larger swings than that. If that's the margin you're trying to operate on, I dare say you're cooked, even if your fields are large.
Well the smaller a field, the larger proportion of end rows. And I was referring to end rows, not the entire field. A 5 acre field is pretty small, and my rough guess is that between end rows, rows shaded by trees and close to water sources, the loss could be pretty significant. Now if you're talking 500-1000 acres, end rows are nothing in the scheme of things.
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