Around the province some wheat stands are not as good as you would like. Each field has to stand on its own merits.
If a wheat field has seven or more plants per foot of row that field has the potential to yield 90 per cent of its potential. (We normally seed 20-23 seeds per foot of row.)
The problem fields are those with dead patches.
Try to get to a spot in the field where you can assess how many acres are dead. One way is to take a representative spot and calculate its area. Then estimate how many other areas there are of equal size. (There are 43,560 sq. ft in an acre).
Typically wheat fields appear worse than they actually are, unless the whole field is dead. Get into the field and check it. When you walk through a field look up and down the field as well as both left and right.
When you look down the row wheat generally looks better than across the rows when it is very small. When you look at wheat down the row in one direction it will look different in the other direction.
If you always drive by a field and it looks poor, go into the field and look at it in a different direction.
You may have to wait until the wheat greens up to make your final call.
If you are not sure if the stand is good enough to keep, apply nitrogen now for wheat. If later it appears that the wheat is not good enough, then plant it into corn. The nitrogen will still be there. Some really good corn crops were grown on fields that had wheat burnt off. BF