Intercropping, Light, and Learning Faster Than the Curve

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Intercropping, Light, and Learning Faster Than the Curve Jason farms in north-central to northeast Indiana on ground that’s been in agriculture on both sides of his family. He’s not new to farming—but he’s never been content doing the same thing everyone else does. Before full-time farming, Jason worked as a landscape contractor. That background shaped how he thinks about crops. In landscaping, you don’t design for next month—you design for 10 or 20 years out. You think about spacing, competition, sunlight, and how plants behave together over time. That mindset carried straight into his farming operation. About 12 years ago, Jason started intercropping. Not because it was trendy, but because corn and soybeans alone felt limiting. He wanted systems that captured more sunlight, reduced inputs, and stacked revenue without stacking risk. Learning Through Scale, Not Guesswork Jason didn’t start with a whole farm change. His first intercropping trial was about 20 acres—big enough to matter, small enough to fail safely. He intentionally used back fields and less visible acres to test ideas. Over time, he ran dozens of variations: different spacings, populations, fertility strategies, and timing. His advice to someone starting today? Run 10 different versions of the idea in one year. You’ll learn in a season what others take decades to figure out. The key isn’t copying his exact setup—it’s understanding your own constraints. Tire traffic, equipment width, combine paths, and logistics all matter. If you can’t harvest it cleanly, it doesn’t matter how good it looks in July. Wheat, Soybeans, and the 80/20 Rule One breakthrough came in wheat–soybean relay systems. Early on, Jason realized you can’t just “grow two great crops” in the same space. Too much wheat hurts soybeans. Too much soybean focus hurts wheat. By applying the 80/20 principle, he reduced wheat population to about 25% of standard rates while still capturing roughly 80% of wheat yield. Banding nutrients and giving each plant more access to light reduced competition. The payoff wasn’t just wheat—it was maintaining soybean yield while cutting chemistry costs by roughly $50 per acre through canopy suppression. In 2018, that system produced 108-bushel soybeans in a relay-crop setup. Corn: Using Light as a Tool Corn followed the same philosophy. Jason runs 20-inch corn as his base system but began experimenting with skipped rows to drive light deeper into the canopy. The results were immediate: plants adjacent to open space became “hogs,” expressing larger ears and kernels simply because competition was removed. This year, his setup included: Four rows of 20-inch corn Outside rows planted at ~77,000 population Inside rows around 47,000 Managed for light penetration and lateral growth The result? Roughly 90% of full yield on just 37.5% of the footprint, plus added biomass that was mowed and dropped back into the system as green manure. The Bigger Lesson Jason isn’t chasing records—he’s chasing efficiency per acre of sunlight. His work shows how plants respond instantly to space, light, and perceived competition. Intercropping isn’t about forcing yield; it’s about changing the environment so plants choose to express more. The takeaway isn’t to copy the system. It’s to start thinking like a designer—not just a planter.