We're All Ears Podcast

Past Episodes

• Jun 21, 2024

  E033: Focus Friday: Agronomy Update and Tar Spot in Corn

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Charles Scovill, gives an agronomic update and visits with Dr. Martin Chilvers, Associate Professor at Michigan State University, about tar spot in corn and how it is showing up in fields earlier this year compared to previous years. Let's check in with this tar spot discussion to learn more about managing this disease

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  13 min

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist, with your Agronomy in Action, Focus Friday, here on June the 21st, 2024. 21st, it is Summer Solstice Day. So all kinds of excitement, of course, around this day, because we're going to start seeing days get shorter, but more importantly, we're going to be pushing flowers and soybeans. So we're going to talk about that, as well as that whole crop progress here in Michigan, share some agronomy calls that I'm getting with you. And I have a special guest, Dr. Marty Chilvers, because we're getting all kinds of questions about tar spot being found in Northern Indiana, right at the doorstep here of Michigan. And kind of give us some idea of putting that into perspective. So first of all, crop progress, the corn planted on the 1st of May has accumulated about 748 heat units. So what does that mean? Well, we're at about V8 growth stage, and now we're putting the length on those ears. And so getting rows long, compared to the rows around we were getting at V5, we are ahead of normal. And we're certainly having some heat out there we're going to talk about as well. But in the soybeans, we had a chance to walk some April planted soybeans, and I'm actually finding lots of flowers out there. And truly, that is the goals we look at, how we increase yields on soybeans all the time, that the advantage of that early planted soybean is getting flowers to start earlier, before that summer solstice time period. So the more flowers, the more yield, and certainly we got a lot of things to go between now and harvest to protect those flowers and the yield, but we'll continue to talk about that in the weeks to come. Let's talk about that heat and rain though, lately. Boy, temperatures in the 90s, we are putting stress on these crops. If you think about the formula for creating GDUs rather, growing degree day units out there, that's all about a low of 50 and a high of 86. So when we're in the 90s, we're not counting those extra heat units, and sometimes they even count against us. But boy, the good news for most of us is we have had some rain. So I haven't seen any rolled corn yet, so this rain has been a nice buffer for that heat. I actually had 2.7 inches at my place northeast of Laingsburg. Heard of some areas of 4 plus inches as well. So the downside of that rain is seeing some ponding. So we're thinking loss of nitrogen in some of those areas, whether that is being from leaching down or some denitrification up in there. And then, of course, the question is those areas underwater. How long can those plants survive? And if it was cool and wet, they could survive a little bit longer. But when it's hot and wet like that and those plants are trying to respire, they just don't have much of a chance for the amount of time they're going to be underwater there, a day or two in there. They're not in good shape at that point. So we're going to evaluate these farm by farm. But if we had some of those heavy rains and we think we lost some of that nitrogen, we don't want to allow that crop to run out of nitrogen by the end of the year. So adding more may certainly play in that, if and when we can still get over that crop. But as far as agronomic calls this week, lots of deer and woodchuck damage showing up, especially in those soybeans there. And I don't think I need to tell you what we need to do to keep those under control. But another thing that's more interesting is rapid growth syndrome. Now we've got the perfect storm for that. And if you remember what that is, you'll look across that corn field and you'll see just scattered yellow plants throughout the field. And you walk out there, those yellow plants, and you can see that, boy, probably a couple of days before that, they were all buggy whipped and wrapped up tight because they're just growing so fast with this heat and moisture out there. And then once they relax a little and open up those whorls, they were pretty tight. They didn't collect any chlorophyll, and so they're bright yellow. But give them a few days to collect some more sunlight there and more chlorophyll built in there, and they green right back up. And really, the good news is no yield loss from those. Also kind of interesting, finding lightning bugs out there. And that, to me, is always that indicator that our corn root worms are starting to hatch. And, you know, granted, the root worm and the lightning bug, they're not related, but they do tend to share a little bit of a path for following the amount of heat units they've had for their development. And by the time they're flying out there for lightning bugs, underground, we're hatching root worm. They're starting to feed. And so in a couple weeks, we can probably start to evaluate some of those roots and float some root worms and take a look and see what our real pressure was this year. So finally today, we're going to jump into a little conversation with Dr. Marty Chilvers and talk about that tar spot found in Northern Indiana. So Dr. Chilvers, good morning and welcome. Hi, Charles. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. Well, you know, as I think about tar spot in this world, I just, I think of Dr. Marty Chilvers. You've had a chance to just be a true expert for the field, for Michigan and truly I think across the United States. So I really appreciate you joining me today. Oh, thank you. So a couple of three questions here. I was hoping you might cover for our listeners. First of which is, you know, with the recent spotting in the tar spot just over the border Indiana, it's just so early in the year. Should my listeners be concerned? Yeah, I think this is one of those years where things are, you know, off to an early start for tar spot, just like we saw back in 2018 and 2021 with wet seasons. So yeah, I am concerned. And I think if we spend a bit of time looking through, you know, perhaps variety trials is a really good spot to go and scout. We may very well find tar spot in those here in Michigan. Well, and that's really interesting too, because, you know, it's one of the, in my mind, the first things to look at is that genetic tolerance. And we've seen over the years how huge of a difference there is from one hybrid to the next on tolerances. And I know at least with our own, we can go on the web and look up any hybrid and give a rating on there and help to think about how we're going to manage those hybrids. Yes, I completely agree, Charles. That's really where we need to start. So if we do have significant issues this year, you know, go back and look at the ratings in your seed catalogs or talk to your seed dealer about that, you know, plan, perhaps some better hybrids going forward. You know, if we didn't make that right choice, you know, if we do choose to spray a fungicide for tar spot this year, the big question now is when is the best time to spray? Because especially with this possible early infection out there. It's a million dollar question, right? So it depends on a few factors. It depends on, you know, obviously planting date, growth stage, the amount of disease pressure, all those things factor into when we should be spraying. And then we sort of want to think about, you know, how many fungicide applications can we actually make that sort of makes sense. So if we are only going to plan on a single fungicide application and use that to get us through the season, a single fungicide application, we've generally seen has got to be on a very late vegetative stages, typically at tassel through to about the R3 growth stage. Most years, a single well-timed application in that window provides sort of the best return on investment. There are certainly some exceptions to that where a second fungicide application can be warranted, but they tend to be fewer in nature. It's always an issue, though, of being aware of where your crop is at, scouting and really keeping an eye on where things are at to make that application. And we do have some risk prediction tools. We have TaskSpotter and FieldProfit are a couple of tools that you can look at to help look at when we're at high risk for a task spot. But generally, if we're looking at the first application, we generally believe waiting until at least the V10 growth stage. We would see very little benefit, I would think, from a V5, V6 fungicide application for task spot management. We really want to think about protecting those leaves that contribute significantly to yield, which are going to come out later, a little bit later in the season. So there's some things that we typically want to think about when to make that fungicide application. So what I'm hearing you say is keep your powder dry right now. Yes, I would. I mean, if you found a few spots in the field, good that you're aware of it, but I wouldn't freak out, pull the trigger now, you know, and then you're going to have to come back if we continue to have leaf wetness events. You're not going to eliminate disease from a field. I think the other thing we want to really be aware of is sort of managing expectations from fungicides. So they're great at suppressing disease. They will not completely eliminate disease, and they'll give us some level of protection for two to three weeks before they start to wane in efficacy. Well, and I think too when we get those multiple modes of action out there and those fungicides out there, the ones that tend to give us a little bigger window of protection, it seems. Absolutely. And I think that's some of the work that the universities have found too, that generally speaking, the multiple fungicide classes in a premixed product do a better job than a single mode of action. And the other thing that we are very concerned about with this disease is the development of fungicide resistance in the pathogen. So if we're using a single mode of action, we're applying a lot more pressure and the risk for fungicide resistance is greater. So the premixed products are a good deal for that. I couldn't agree more. And the last question here, I think, it's been really hot and really humid this week. It's got me thinking, how do you think this is going to affect the spread of tar spot development in Michigan? I mean, I don't think the heat is going to shut it down. I did call my colleague in Georgia back in 2021 asking him why he's finding so much because early on we sort of assumed it was a cooler season disease. But now I think we've got plenty of evidence that it can handle warm temperatures. And there's been findings in Kansas and Missouri already. I think it was a couple of weeks ago now. So it's out and about, and it's not going to really be slowed down by the warm temperatures. The thing that will slow it down is dryness. So the thing that it's going to need is leaf wetness events, essentially. So be that through rainfall or dew periods at night, or if we're irrigating, you know, excessive irrigation applications. So they're the things that sort of think about in terms of risk factors for disease spread. And we know it takes probably around about two to three weeks from, you know, when a spore lands on the plant, it becoming infected and then being able to release spores again. So that's a really critical piece. Yeah, well, I'm glad you mentioned the irrigation, too, because, boy, we've seen that, some of the worst-case scenarios, and you've seen the photos as well from the air, when you find drier corners that don't have tar spot and irrigated areas that do. So I'm watching those areas especially. Yeah, absolutely. And don't give up on irrigation. We still need to irrigate. And so some of the lessons there have been that if we irrigate, we want to put on as fewer passes of the pivot as possible within reason in terms of soil moisture and how much water you can put down before you have runoff. But you're just trying to be aware of your pivot, uniformity for irrigation, and then minimizing the passes of that pivot. But we've seen that, yeah, absolutely, irrigation will drive disease. But if the year turns dry, we're going to need that water as well for grain development. So don't give up on the irrigation. It's still a very important tool. Yeah, 100% agree. And just manage it a little differently. So, hey, Dr. Chilvers, really appreciate your time today. I know you're going to be on top of this throughout the season and probably even have you back on maybe later on as we watch this develop. So again, really appreciate your time today. And folks, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist with your Agronomy in Action Focus Friday.

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• Jun 19, 2024

  E032: Heatwaves, Double Cropping, and Corn Rootworm

  Join Golden Harvest Agronomist, Wayde Looker, this week as he covers several diverse topics and considerations from the field. He discusses the impact of heat across the Midwest, including nitrogen in corn and soybean flowering. Double cropping and soybean maturities are a timely topic for growers in Wayde's territory right now too. Corn rootworm is setting up to be an impactful pest in corn this season based on environmental conditions thus far, so be checking your fields for this pest.

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  13 min

  Episode Transcript

  Welcome back to the Golden Harvest We're All Ears podcast, where we will feature agronomic insights from across the Midwest to answer pressing questions and help spark discussions. Thanks for joining us. Hello, and welcome to the Kernels of Agronomy podcast. I'm your host, Wayde Looker. Today is June 18th, and we have a lot to talk about in the world of agronomy. We're going to talk about three or four different pretty important topics that have been impacting most of Ohio and the rest of our trade area, and really the entire Midwest in general. This past week or so, extending through the end of the week, has been extremely hot. It is currently 95 degrees outside here at my house in central Ohio, and I think that's pretty indicative of what we are seeing across much of the eastern Corn Belt this week. Accompanying this hot weather has been the occasional pop-up storm. However, most of our geographic area that I cover anyway, really could use a drink of rain too. So hopefully we're able to get some relief from the heat in the form of some precipitation here shortly. The first thing I did want to talk about today has to do with the weather that we're experiencing. This week, with it being so hot, I am starting to see more crop response from herbicide applications and nitrogen applications. So if there's any guys out there, any folks that spread urea, top dressing wheat, or maybe you wide drop some 28 on your corn, and it hasn't rained since that application, you are likely, very likely, to be seeing some leaf burn because of that. Depending on severity of it, of course, it can range from not a concern at all to maybe something to be a little bit more concerned about. You are losing nitrogen when that happens rather than getting it incorporated into the soil, which is never a good thing. And so we need to keep that in mind when considering maybe a late season application of nitrogen later on. You know, if you are somebody that likes to make that late season nitrogen pass with maybe a wide drops or something like that, you might want to consider maybe bumping that rate up a little bit, or even doing an application in the first place, since we are likely to have some nitrogen volatilization right now. The other thing that we're seeing on the soybean side of things is some leaf burn. Particularly with the glufosinate herbicide system, you know, you need to include some AMS in order to make that really work as effectively as we would want it to. Therefore, sometimes it can get a little bit hot, and I am seeing some leaf speckling out there. For the most part, it's a cosmetic thing, but that is something that you're likely to see out in the fields right now. With that said, all this heat that we've had throughout the year has had a couple of different effects on our crop. Let's continue with the soybean discussion here. Flowering is really starting to take off. Here in central Ohio, where I'm at, I planted some two eights there at the end of April, and they are already flowering. So that's really important because a lot of these labels get awfully restrictive after the flowering stages. And so please consult the label on the herbicide that you're planning on using post, because you may be approaching some of those label restrictions and not even know it. Earlier this week, I was in southwest Ohio where we were looking at some three sevens, actually. April planted three sevens, and they were full R2. So keep that in mind. Beans seem to be flowering a little bit earlier than normal this year. And so make sure that you are scouting your fields before you load the sprayer up and go out there and make an application. Additionally, since we're flowering early, probably a pretty good chance we're going to be setting pods a little bit early, too. And so keep that in mind. For those of you that are planning on making an R3 application on your soybeans, I'm a huge fan of it. I think there's a lot of merit to it. But that really critical timeframe may be sneaking up on us here if we're not out there scouting and making sure that we're where we want to be in terms of the crop stage. Additionally, all this warm weather has also accelerated wheat harvest a bit. So wheat harvest has already started in areas of southern Ohio with good moistures and good yields from early reports. That also gives us an opportunity to plant our double crops early. One of the most important elements to having really good double crop yields is getting them planted in a timely manner. A couple of other really important factors to consider when trying to maximize our double crops is seeding rate. And seeding rate has something to do with actually the shortness of the growing period that we're exposing these soybeans to. So if you think about your soybean crop, or really any crop for that matter, as a factory, because that's literally what your crop is doing, is it's taking an input, sunlight, rain, fertility, things like that, and it's creating an output, the seed. That's what we're going to harvest. And so the longer that we can keep that factory open, the greater output we're likely to see out of that factory. You know, if a window factory is open eight hours a day, we would expect less output out of that factory than a factory that's open 12 hours a day. And it's the same premise that we have going on here with our double crop beans. Because we're planting them late, we're already shortening that period of time that our factory is open. Therefore, there's a couple of different things that we do to try to enhance or keep that factory open longer into the growing season. One of the ways that we do that is by planting the longest maturing soybean variety that we're fairly confident won't get frosted off early. And I know that that is rather ambiguous and difficult to try and pin down. For most of Ohio, that tends to be the mid-group three range. You know, if you're in southern Ohio, that can stretch out maybe into, you know, early fours. If you're down in southern Ohio, down by the river. If you're clear up in northern Ohio by Lake Erie or up by Michigan, maybe you're more into the early group threes there. For your maximum, you know, relative maturity of soybean for double crops. And again, the idea is that if we can delay that natural senescence as long as possible, that's just a longer period of time for those soybean plants to accumulate sunshine, accumulate fertility, accumulate water, and actually turn that into grain for us. The other thing that we do to try and offset the shortened growing season is actually seeding rate, which may not make a lot of sense at first, but let me explain. You've probably heard in the past that vegetative growth does not equate to yield. That, you know, just because a bean gets really, really tall doesn't mean it's going to yield really well. And there's some truth to that. However, vegetative growth does play a role in top in yield potential. Think about it, every area on that plant where you have a branch come off the main stem, that's a node. A node is an area where we will set flowers and then pods and then of course seed. And so if we shorten that growing season by a whole bunch, by planting late into June or even early July, we're spending a shorter amount of time in those really important vegetative stages. So we're going to get fewer nodes per plant. Fewer nodes per plant or fewer places to set flowers, fewer places to set pods, fewer places to have seed. Therefore, if we know we're going to have fewer nodes per plant and we still want to maintain a strong number of nodes per acre, we need to increase the amount of plants that we have per acre. So I'm a big proponent of pushing soybean population. Once we get into June and especially into mid to late June, we really need to be pushing those populations up past 200,000 in order to try and really gain the most that we can out of these double crop acres. So again, some of the keys is obviously we want to start clean, stay clean in terms of weed control. But then we want to get them planted as soon as we can after harvest. We want to use a full season variety that we're relatively confident won't get frosted off early. And then we want to increase that seeding rate, you know, 200 to 250 somewhere right there is probably the sweet spot for most people. Another thing is if you do have a drill, I prefer drills as well over planting them in 15 or 30s. Again, we're able to close those rows quicker. We're able to get to canopy faster, which means more sunlight hitting leaf area and leaf tissue, less area getting wasted by hitting the ground. Not everybody has that capability at that point, especially for double crops, but it is something to consider if you can. The final thing that I want to call out right now is something that I'm concerned will raise this ugly head over the course of the next few weeks here. We are ahead on GDUs for the year. That is true for our crops, but also true for our crops' pests. One pest in particular is corn rootworm. So corn rootworm matures by GDUs, just like our corn does. However, we've had a lot of warm days here across Ohio and our geography really since the beginning of February. And so while we're ahead of GDUs in terms of our crop season, we're even further ahead in terms of insect development. So sitting here on June 18th, I am quite confident that there are many fields in our heavy livestock areas that already have significant root feeding going on. We've also not had the great big, you know, real heavy four to five inch rains in those specific livestock areas that we really need to drown our corn rootworm larva. And so since we've had a relatively easy spring in terms of real severe rain events, and because our corn rootworm larva are able to start earlier and feed on smaller plants, I do think that we are in for a corn rootworm year, something that guys do need to be cognizant of, do need to be ready for. I do expect more foliar insecticide applications to be required this year to take care of adult beetles. This is something that I do fear may raise its ugly head worse this year than we've seen in probably quite a few years. So if you're concerned about it, get with your local Golden Harvest Seed Advisor sales rep or even myself, and we can go dig some roots, float them in water, and then see if we get any corn rootworm larva floating to the top of the bucket. This is primarily going to be a corn on corn type of issue. So I would begin my scouting in those corn on corn acres. I'd also like to invite our listeners that if you have a Golden Harvest field that looks particularly strong, I'd love to enter it into the National Corn Growers Association field contest. Last year, we had three out of the top 12 entries here in Ohio with three different hybrids actually. So really good results there. I'd like to piggyback on that this year just to show the industry what our performance can be like. So if you have a really good looking field, let me know and we'll get you entered. We also have a high yield soybean contest. So if you have a field of beans that you're particularly pleased with and that you plan on pushing, again, let me know and we can get you entered in that as well. So thanks again and look forward to hearing from you. With that, we'll wrap up this latest episode of Kernels of Agronomy. Again, I'm your host, Wayde Looker. If you have any questions following this podcast, please feel free to reach out to myself or any of your local Golden Harvest seed advisors or sales representatives. We'll see you again on the next edition of the Kernels of Agronomy podcast. It has been great to have you with us on this podcast. This has been Golden Harvest We're All Ears. You won't want to miss our upcoming episodes, so subscribe to We're All Ears on your preferred podcast streaming platform. And remember, just like you're listening, we're listening too. So join the conversation and interact with us at Golden Harvest on Facebook or Twitter, or at Golden Harvest Seeds on Instagram and tell us what you thought of the episode. Thanks for listening to We're All Ears. We'll catch you in the next episode.

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• Jun 17, 2024

  E031: Beyond the Seed: Corn and Soybean Watch-Outs in the Field

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Adam Mayer, discusses what he is seeing in the field along with some watch-outs that you may want to check your fields for. He also brings up nutrients, nitrogen in corn, and what could be turning your soybeans yellow at this time of the crop season. Join Adam and listen to what he is seeing in his territory this week.

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  11 min

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, and welcome to the Golden Harvest We're All Ears Podcast, where we will feature agronomic insights from across the Midwest to answer pressing questions and help spark discussions. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to this episode of Beyond the Seed. Co-host Kellen Meyer here to help you out today. Now, introducing your host, Golden Harvest Agronomist, Adam Mayer. Thank you, Kellen. Well, we got a beautiful day out there today, but we got some work to do here on the podcast to start things out. So I really want to go over some things that we're seeing in the field today. There's some watchouts, what we're seeing out there. Then I really want to hammer home on some nutrient things and really want to focus on some nitrogen for corn. A lot of questions around that. And we're also going to talk about that other crop when we're looking at soybeans out there as well. Let's start with corn then. What's currently going on out there? Well, as far as corn right now, if I look at a planning date of that April 24th time frame, we're currently at about 550 GDUs versus 542 average. So we're pretty close to an average there and well behind last year when I look at GDUs. So we're about 100 GDUs behind last year. And a lot of growers have that pretty fresh in their memory. So we're currently at that V5, V6 stage. That growing point is above ground for that 424, 425 type of planting date. When I look at some of those fields planted a little bit later, in that May 12th or Mother's Day type of time frame, we're currently at 422 GDUs versus 433 on average. So we're just a day or two behind average from that planting date and well behind once again last year having just over 500 GDUs in that time frame. And this will put us at that V4 stage. So just before that growing point is going to be coming out of ground, just before some of those herbicides will come off label for spraying there as well. When we're driving around, there's been some pale and yellow corn out there. What's the cause of that? Well, that's a pretty loaded question. There could be a lot of reasons here on that yellowing, but I've gotten this question quite a bit from growers. We know that corn really likes a perfect environment to get going. And we didn't have that in a lot of cases. We've had, especially in the soil, a little bit cooler and wetter environment. You can see those tile lines or the low areas where there was more water. We know that those areas probably were both cooler and wetter. That high precipitation or having more water there creates a little more difficult environment to warm up. So you see variances with, you know, maybe some V5 corn next to some spike or V1 corn just because of those environmental differences. One of the big things is a lack of oxygen. We know that all living things need oxygen to live, and that's above the soil, below the soil, doesn't matter. So for that biological activity, we really need oxygen. And so we need some more oxygen getting to the root system and helping that biology below the ground as well. The other thing is for root development in cases as well. So we're not getting to some of the nutrients or even getting a good start there from architecture standpoint for that root system with maybe some saturated conditions that led to a compaction layer, sidewall compaction, all those sorts of things I've seen out there as well. So another potential cause for that yellowing. We did get a lot of our herbicides on and our corn plants are going to be able to work through that chemistry, but it does take some energy to metabolize that and they have to work it through their system and exude it through the roots most of the time. So that is a bit of a process and, you know, the better conditions we have, warmer sunshine, et cetera, it's definitely going to help overcome that quicker. A few other things we've seen out there. Pythium, some diseases have been coming in, which, you know, we would kind of expect on a wetter start in a lot of cases. I would expect some phytophthora be showing up here pretty soon as well as we get into a little warmer, wetter environment. And then seen some other interesting things with some rootless corn or some herbicide interactions, especially with shallower planted stuff. I've talked about this before, seen a lot of shallow planted corn this year for various reasons, and that's really going to cause issues all the way through the season. A lot of windy days right now. And without that root development, it's really causing some issues there with that nodal root system development and that wind dried out that first half an inch of soil on the top. And that really led to a lack of root development and causing some other issues there as well. So that's unfortunate. But there's some cases that we're actually going to need some more moisture there to keep things going. You said you wanted to touch on nitrogen. Do growers have any lift that they've applied? That's a good question. Well, there's some complexities with that. When I look at, you know, all the moisture we had right now, there's a lot of areas that have ponded. And are saturated in those areas. We definitely have had denitrification. So that's where we're letting gas, nitrogen gas, that was converted from nitrate by those microbes in the soil. So we lost that nitrogen in those areas. That's the majority. When I look at what we might have lost through leaching, let's look at anhydrous first. You know, up until a few weeks ago, there probably wasn't a lot of conversion for that anhydrous. To a nitrate version. But as these soils have warmed up, that process is a lot more rapid now. So we are starting to see quite a bit more conversion there. So that loss potential is definitely higher at this point. More in line with what a 32% or anything else that's in more of a nitrate form. We have that potential for that to move through the profile. So that's kind of the other thing that I am kind of watching out for with growers. And they're starting to see some of that in the field is maybe this nitrogen is still there in the profile, but it might be a little bit lower than where we're at right now to be able to access it. So there have been several growers that have recommended doing some side dressing and having something that's more close to that root system that we can take advantage and then hopefully have that deeper profile nitrogen available for later in the season. We can do some nitrate testing at different levels in that soil profile to kind of see where your nitrogen is. Do maybe a 0 to 6, 6 to 12, 12 to 18 and something like that, or even just a 0 to 12 and a 12 to 24 inch sample just to see where that nitrogen is in the profile could help you make some decisions there as well. Also seeing some other deficiencies out there, we have had some sulfur deficiencies showing up, some zinc, some other things, and a lot of that's going to be around root development and not necessarily that there's a big shortage out there, but we're probably just not able to access it yet. But we can do some tissue sampling, trying to understand what the plant is up taking and what it's short of at the moment. A lot of times that's good to do multiple through the season to see how we're progressing and if that issue is truly a deficiency at that snapshot time or if it's a deficiency all the way through the season. So to do these tissue samples, we'd like to take 15 to 20 samples and we just take that top fully developed leaf and combine those all together to send in. It looks like soybeans are getting some growth to them, but some of them also look yellow as we drive around. Yeah, just like the corn, we are wanting some more sunshine and want to get rid of some of that water, help with root development there and that will definitely bring things around. Some of this early yellowing can also be from a lack of nodulation and could be lack of sulfur. We know that sulfur helps with that early nodulation and an early sulfur source with soybeans can help in some cases as well. So we know that nothing does real well in those saturated conditions and sulfur release is not happening rapidly when we have a cool wet environment in the soil there. So definitely seeing some variation there from field to field with how healthy we're looking based on some of those things there. Currently, we're at that V2, V3, so second trifoliate or third trifoliate. Well on our way. I actually had some cases that we're actually at that R1, so we're beginning flowering in some cases, which is awesome to see before summer solstice here. That's about a week before summer solstice. So that's well on our way to high yield when we have flowering this far ahead of summer solstice. When I look at weed control and what's going on out in soybeans, most of the time, pre's have done a good job, but we want to continue that momentum and stay on top of these weeds. And if we're spraying bare dirt, so be it. That's a good thing. So we want to be on top of this post and don't wait until the weeds are getting too big out there. Keep them while they're manageable. And just a couple other antidotes or notes on when we're spraying our post there. You can throw in some manganese with that glyphosate if you're using glyphosate on your soybeans. And that can help with that flash and overcome that metabolism of the glyphosate molecule a little quicker for the soybeans. It is important to take care of those volunteers as well for a corn rootworm management practice as well because we know that they could be feeding on those volunteers that are out there and could be problems for the years ahead. So just keep that mind on the soybean side. Well, it sounds like there's a lot going on in both crops and growers should be out checking their fields. Yeah, that's definitely exactly right. That will be a wrap on this week's Beyond the Seed series podcast. We hope you've picked something up today and join us next time. It has been great to have you with us on this podcast. This has been Golden Harvest We're All Ears. You won't want to miss our upcoming episodes, so subscribe to We're All Ears on your preferred podcast streaming platform. And remember, just like you're listening, we're listening too. So join the conversation and interact with us at Golden Harvest on Facebook or Twitter or at Golden Harvest Seeds on Instagram and tell us what you thought of the episode. Thanks for listening to We're All Ears. We'll catch you in the next episode.

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• Jun 14, 2024

  E030: Focus Friday: Weed Management

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Charles Scovill, gives an agronomic update and brings in guest, Crop Protection Agronomic Service Representative, Justine Terwillegar, to discuss early season herbicide timing restrictions, perennial weeds, and managing waterhemp. Listen in for this fantastic crop management discussion!

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  15 min

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist with our Agronomy in Action Focus Friday here on June the 14th. So, crop progress, service calls, and a special guest is the way we've been running these this year, and we're going to continue in that same pattern this year, but I do want to offer something new for our listeners. If you happen to have any questions or particular topics of interest, feel free to go ahead and drop those in an email to me at Charles.Scovill at Syngenta.com, and we'd love to just address some of those in future weeks if we get a chance. So, crop progress this week, spent a lot of time on the road. Also was looking at our GHX app, and that corn that we planted on the 1st of May would have accumulated right now 606 heat units. That would put it at that key V5 growth stage, and of course, we're putting rows around and a lot of corn out there in the field right now, and most of the corn is in really good shape, so I feel great about the potential of putting just the maximum number of rows around those corn ears out there. But, soil moisture is actually lower than expected. Right now, at about 15% versus the normal 32%, and I know some folks are still damp in places, but we could use a rain here in central Michigan, and we've got some hot, dry days coming at us next week. Now, the reality is, it's probably not so bad because these plants are just pushing down roots, they're looking for moisture, and that's going to set them up for probably some greater success come this fall. Speaking of fall, the GHX app is putting us at a September 22nd black layer date, a 32% moisture. So we'll get this heat, and that'll probably move that along even faster. Soybean-wise, been digging and finding lots of nodulations on those roots. You cut those little nodules open, they're pink inside, they're producing nitrogen, they're creating great color. A lot of them, if you think about the V stages, seeing a lot of V1, V2, and further along even, yet trifoliates out there fully open. In general, though, I will say the corn crop probably looks better than the soybean crop, a lot tougher soybeans out there, especially those planted that late April, early May time period this year. Service call wise, got a few interesting calls this year. Actually, true armyworms reported over in the Ravana area. I had a friend that cut some hay underneath that. The ground was crawling with armyworms. And certainly interesting, what do we do from here? So the threshold for armyworms, you need 50% of the plants showing fresh cutting and larvae that are one and a quarter inches or smaller in order to justify a spray out there. A lot of those larvae are pretty big right now, but please keep an eye on those wheat fields and oat fields and even corn fields out there, because if they're still feeding, they're going to march across the roads. They're going to continue to feed and we certainly want to spray if we're hitting that threshold. A non-insect, actually slugs, which are mollusks and not affected by insecticides out there, still got another report this week in central Michigan, a complete soybean field devastated and needed to be replanted from slugs. Now, truly the best solution there is tillage. We've got to destroy their homes. We've got to dry out that top inch of soil. But folks, when we're replanting that, we got to make sure also we're getting that seed into where the moisture is. And with this warm weather, we should get some really fast growth and probably outgrow most of that damage out there. Finally here, tar spot. Can you believe it? It actually has been found in northwest Indiana, not too far from the state of Michigan already confirmed. Also in Iowa and some other places, so way too close for us, but you think of the spring we've had, it's been just consistently damp. And that is ideal for getting the brewing of tar spot going. So what do we do today? Just simply be aware that we're probably going to have to do a fair amount of scouting for tar spot this year. And so be thinking about that, putting that into our plans as the season progresses. The other thing out there on the road, I've seen a lot of, I guess what I will just call, sprayer blight. Just some tough fields where you can see the leftovers of some damage from sprays, and just asking folks to be careful out there just not to damage this crop anymore than what we're going to have out there just naturally. But thinking of that whole idea of crop protection, I have asked Justine Terwillegar, our Syngenta Agronomic Service rep, to join us here this week, talk a little bit about that, herbicide and crop protection world. Welcome, Justine. Hi, Charles, how are you? Hey, I am great. Loving the chance to be out there and seeing these crops growing and developing and really appreciate you joining us here today. As we jump right into the three questions I want to cover, the first is, you know, it is starting to get that time of the year when crop development is causing some of these foreign herbicide cutoffs. I guess, what do my listeners need to be thinking about for controlling some of these late season weeds? Yeah, Charles, that's a good question and something that's been coming in a lot. As you mentioned, it's funny with our soil moisture, it is below average right now. But if we go back and thinking when we were planting corn, it was super high, we just couldn't catch a break to get into the fields, to get planted, to get applications out, battling against wind as well. And what this led to this season on those corn acres is we missed out on a lot of pre-emergence herbicides, that window. So what this led to is having to push back those applications to more of an early post-program or even making some adjustments to our weed management program. So something to keep in mind, and you kind of hit on it, we are seeing there's some crop response out there just because of the conditions I think we've had to spray in, but also we need to be aware of what our key height or growth stage cut-off are for these herbicides in a post-emergent setting. And really that's going to start, V2 is probably the earliest one. Fortunately, most of our herbicides are not cut off at that point. I would say our most common one is going to be 11 to 12 inches, which we are, I would say, getting past that, not on all acres, just because we do have a variation in growth stage out there depending on when stuff was planted. V6 would be another common timing. And then V8 is really going to be, I would say, that last major growth stage cutoff or 30-inch tall corn. So those are things to keep in mind. And why it's important that we don't go past these application cutoffs is we do have the potential to really bang up our corn, especially past that V6 timing, because that growing point is going to be above ground at that point. Now, what I would recommend is if we are in that post-application timing, which for most of our corn acres we are, I would make sure, one, paying attention to that application cutoff, but then also tank mixing in, if it's not already in a premixed product, a non-selective foliar herbicide, such as glyphosate, that cutoff for that product is going to be 30-inch tall or V8 corn, which gives us a little bit more leeway, or glufosinate is another good option, and that's going to be a V6 cutoff. Now, with these two herbicides, something to remember is your corn has to be tolerant to these herbicides, so this would not work in a conventional program. And really the value in that and adding in those non-selective foliar herbicides is, it's going to offer a little bit more robustness and burn down of our annual grasses and other broadleaves that might already be out there, and offer another effective herbicide mode of action to your program. And from a resistance management standpoint, which is, I would say, on the top of everyone's mind every season, this is a really good practice. And Justine, I couldn't agree more on this multiple modes of action thing out here. We just, we're fighting a tough fight, and that's about the only way we're going to stay ahead of that. And every time I listen to you here, I think about, of course, the label is the law, right? And so thinking of that and all of these things you are recommending, and certainly always checking our labels on that as well. The next thing is, walking fields this week, I am seeing more and more perennial weeds out there. Any thoughts on controlling these tough weeds? Yeah, so that is a hot topic. So often when we think about weed control, we're thinking about now and getting effective control right now. But something that we need to think about and shift our mindset on with these perennial weeds, such as things like Canada Thistle, Pope Weed, Hemp Dog Vein, Milkweed, I would say those are the most common ones I've encountered over the last month, is actually the most effective time to control these weeds is early fall. So when we think about our perennial weeds, these are weeds that are going to come back every year so they have a root system that's constantly there. So when we're thinking about how these weeds grow, when they're in the stage right now that we're at, they're rapidly growing and they're putting all their energy into new leaves and producing flowers. So what that means is if we go out there with an application of glyphosate or glufosinate, those herbicides are not going to be translocated down to that root, which is how we're going to get an effective kill. They're going to be translocated up, which is not going to give us a super effective kill. It might just burn off the top, which means they're going to keep coming back year after year. So with that in mind, obviously it's not great news to hear. There are things that we can do. If it's really an eye sore out there, you can burn off the top. Another option is with most of these weeds, you can also get effective control like during flower bud initiation or kind of right after, because at that point the growth or above top growth have kind of settled out and that herbicide will start to translocate down to the roots, but that doesn't always align with where we're at in terms of cutoff. So something that might need to happen is when we're looking at trying to control most of our other annual broadleaves and annual grasses is get out earlier with your prime herbicide program. And then we might have to come back closer to that like 30 inch timeframe, just because it's more than more than likely when that perennial weed is going to be at that flower bud standpoint. Now, when we think about that fall application timing, what I would say is glyphosate, I know there's mixed reviews on this because I have growers that have gone out right now with glyphosate and they're like, it didn't work. Well, in the fall, most often glyphosate is going to be our best option because it moves very good systemically. And again, that plant will be translocating all those sugars down to that root to give it a good kill. Another thing to keep in mind with this is on top of being out there at the correct time, we need to make sure that we're utilizing proper application techniques. So having a higher GPA, make sure you're choosing the right nozzle, spraying at the right speed, spraying in the right conditions, so making sure it's not too windy. And this is all going to help us get that effective control. Yeah, absolutely, a GPA gallons per acre there, getting enough water to move that product around there. And yeah, I think about anything that's getting ready to go into winter, it's trying to survive. So it's trying to stuff back down into those roots. So what a great thing to put down that roots is some glyphosate and knock those things out with that fall application. Great advice there. Finally, let's talk water hemp. It is getting worse in Michigan every year it seems. How should we be managing it in corn and soybeans? Yeah, so that is a good question, Charles. Water hemp is definitely, I think, top of mind with most of our growers. It's one of the toughest weeds that we battle with, not just in corn and soybeans, but across a lot of our other specialty crops. The dried beans deals with it, sugar beet deals with it. Basically any crop we're growing in Michigan is struggling to combat against this weed. And one reason why it spreads so rapidly is it has a very high seed production, which if you've gone out and seen a waterhemp plant at the end of the season, there can sometimes be hundreds of thousands of seeds on one plant. So it really doesn't take much to have a major issue within a couple of years. But there are things that we can do to manage it. And I would say one of the key management practices is going to be having a grower implement an overlapping residual program on their farm. And what this means, I know it's kind of a funny term, like what does it even mean? And that's going to be starting out with a pre-emergence residual herbicide. So such as a herbicide motive action group 15 product. So this might be like an S-metolachlor based product. And then what we're going to do in the ideal world is come back within 21 to 28 days later with another application of that residual product. And the main goal in doing this is that we're going to keep that soil concentration of that herbicide at an adequate level through canopy closure to hopefully minimize any weed escapes of small feet of broadleaf, such as waterhemp. Palmer is another one I've gotten questions on recently that falls into that same Amaranthus family. And then things such as annual grasses, which I would say has also become more of an issue recently. Another key benefit of having that planned overlapping residual is it does reduce selection pressure for herbicide resistant weed populations. And that's because when we think about our soil applied herbicides, they're really great. That is the best time to target those weeds is when there are seed versus when they're up and out of the ground. But if we're not replenishing that soil to an adequate level, especially for things that have a wide emergence window, such as waterhemp, we are potentially exposing to reduce rates in the soil. So one way to combat that again, is this overlapping residual idea where hopefully it can keep us clean through that season and we would have minimal weed escape. Very good Justine, I appreciate that. The more we can stay ahead of that weed, the better for all of us. So again, Justine, thank you so much for being with us today and folks appreciate you listening as well. So everybody have a great weekend ahead.

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• Jun 07, 2024

  E029: Weed and Insect Pest Control Considerations

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Ben Whaley, is joined in this episode by Syngenta Agronomic Service Representative, Jesse Grote, to discuss weed control in corn and soybeans along with some of the pests they are seeing in the field this year. Check in with them to hear about some insect and disease pests to watch out for this crop season.

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  11 min

  Episode Transcript

  Welcome back to the Golden Harvest We're All Ears podcast, where we will feature agronomic insights from across the Midwest to answer pressing questions and help spark discussions. Golden Harvest is dedicated to partnering with farmers to deliver custom solutions for each unique agronomic challenge. Thanks for joining us. This is Ben Whaley, and this is the We're All Ears podcast. I am an agronomist for Golden Harvest in Southern Iowa, and today I'm joined by Jesse Grote. Jesse, how are you? I'm doing well, Ben. Thanks for having me on. Jesse, what have you been seeing this year? Man, how much time do we have for the podcast? I don't know. It's, this has been a year where we've seen a little bit about, a little bit of everything, I think. Got off to a great start there in early April, those crops that went in at that time. I mean, at least in my area, I live up here around Boone. The stands all look fantastic. And then I think as we got towards the end of April, I think we've seen a few more challenges with some of those stands that got in ahead of the heavy rain. But from the weed control perspective, what we continue to see is the value of controlling weeds in the soil. And that's by getting on a good heavy rate of a pre-emerge product with multiple effective modes of action. And I know what we did see too was because of weather variables and the pace at which we can plant. In some cases, we weren't able to get that done. So we've had to be flexible in a lot of cases, and sometimes that means changing products that can be used as an early post-emerge instead of a pre-emerge, especially on the soybean side, a lot of the pre-emerge products on soybeans. The window closes pretty fast on those once the crop starts coming up. So, yeah, I'd say variability is the word and the value of controlling the weeds in the soil this year really continues to show. Yeah, great insight there. What do you think is happening here with, we had such a big gap in different planting days. We started planting April 10th some places, and then we got a little bit in the 24th, 25th, and then we waited about two or three weeks again. So, and then the variability that goes in with that, you got some B2 corn and some B6, B7 corn. That's going to be kind of a handful to hang on to all year, and we don't want to get escaped. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think what we're going to see as far as residual hanging on, a lot of that's going to be a function of the product and the rate. And back to a little bit of what I said is, the bigger the rate, the better. I mean, I know that sounds kind of, it may sound kind of silly at first, but it continues to bear true. So I've seen a lot of fields this year that have had a full rate of a pre-emerge on that's still hanging on strong to this day. And that's, you know, 45-ish or more days later. Now we certainly want to get back with another pass on those as soon as we can. I'm going to get an overlapping layer of residual on those. As far as the variability in the stand, that could have some impact on how quickly canopy. Again, we definitely got to stay on our labels as far as, you know, we got to use the most restrictive piece of the label there when it comes to crop height and make sure we're not exceeding that and use the majority of the field to judge that. But, you know, if we are going to be slow to canopy in some cases, because we have a lot of variability there, like again, that's going to stress and we're going to see the value and the importance of coming back with a second pass of residual herbicide, getting more herbicide in the dirt to continue to control those weeds before they could come up, especially if we have a variable situation like that, that might be slow to canopy. You know, we're getting some good heat now that could grow pretty fast, hopefully we can get canopy quick and choke those weeds out. What do you think about the beans? We have a lot of early beans planted as well. We got some really nice stands of beans that probably should canopy about the same time as the corn is looking like on some of those 15-inch beans. Yeah, the beans that went in early around here, I agree. There's a really nice stands. And I think in beans, it's overlapping residual and corn is super important, but in beans, I would argue it's even more important. And what we've seen again is the value of that residual killing the weeds in the soil early. But then I think sometimes what we can fall into with beans, and we're guilty of this in corn too sometimes, but is we don't need to wait to see the weeds to go kill them, right? You mentioned how warm it's getting. We know how quick water can grow, how quick it can get out of hand quickly. So I think scouting these bean fields, especially the ones that went in early, where that pre maybe has been on for a long time. And let's use the calendar in some cases and go spray those fields. Let's not wait until we see weeds. We don't need to see them to kill them. Our best chance to kill them in a lot of cases is killing them before they come up. I've always been the, we see weeds are too late. We should have been there a week earlier. Agreed. I like your check the calendar and not the field. That's always a good thing to think of. What are your thoughts on fungicide at this point? We had some late corn, like we said, that might not be as far along, but we still have quite a bit of good corn that we got in early that's got some very high yield potential. Your thoughts on fungicide for that scenario with tar spot, and then maybe what are your thoughts on two-pass fungicide as well? So I think in a year like this, we talked a little bit about how variable the stands are, and they're variable even within the same field in a lot of cases, right? Whether that's from a drought out or planting delays, et cetera. Protecting that yield, the yield we still have out there, in my opinion, becomes even more important in a year like this, where we've got our good stuff and maybe some of the more variable, but making sure we can maximize what we get out of our good stand is extra important because we need those bushels. We need those bushels even more in a year like this. And the best way to do that is to apply a good plant health fungicide. And that goes for corn and soybeans. And as far as timing goes in corn, we continue to see the best benefit comes from that VTR1 application. So then naturally the question comes up, you know, I had to plant 25% of that field after the other or drown out, then I came back and replant, when do I apply? And that kind of goes, use the majority of the field, right? So if the majority of the field, in your opinion has reached that VTR1, then it's time to go. Is some of it still going to be late vegetative? Yes. And we still get value out of that application in late vegetative. But the watch out there is make sure we're keeping an eye on our adjuvants. We definitely want to use NPE-free adjuvants if we're going on late vegetative or some of the field might be that way. In regards to 2 pass, I think 2 pass in my opinion is somewhat situational. You mentioned tar spot. Are we going to have it this year? Are we not? Conditions would say we're probably set up pretty good for it, but it's one of those ones you need to be out scouting for. That scouting needs to start. Once we get past V8 into V10, we really need to be out there looking for tar spot. And if I'm seeing it at that point, I'm probably thinking about shifting to a two-pass program, especially if I see it start to spread. And that two-pass would look like a late vegetative V10, V12, and then followed up by that VTR1. Now you can do that the other way. If tar spot starts to come in and say later, when you get that first VTR1 application, we do get a lot of good residual control out of the plant health fungicides, but I'm keeping an eye on that. And then I'm maybe hitting that again at about that R3 stage. Yeah, very good insight. What are your thoughts on bugs coming in for corn and soybeans at this point? Yeah, we've seen some interesting early season activity. Stockport showed up in a few places. Bean leaf beetles had a very excellent first hatch. I think we continue to see the value of seed treatment early on in controlling that early flush of bean leaf beetles. I think it's to be determined some. I'd be keeping my eye out for aphids again this year. As far as corn rootworm goes, the rain is really doing us favor. I know it's caused field delays and all kinds of headaches for a lot of people in some cases, but one of the most lethal thing on corn rootworms is saturated soil. So I know the populations had really started to get up and I think we're going to get some relief from that. It's to be seen, but I think we'll definitely get some relief on some of those high rootworm populations from the rain that we've had. Well, in addition to, we have continued to have really good adoption of soil applied insecticide in places where we need it, along with the tray packages, still continue to bring a lot of value in controlling those. Yeah, I mean, I think you do see a lot of value, especially in soybeans of, when you're out there at that R3 fungicide application, riding along an insecticide product to take care of any aphids or anything that might be out there as well. You have seen a lot of bugs. I saw quite a few black cutworms from the cover crop. We have a lot of cover crop in Southern Iowa, it seems like, in certain places. They seem to be wreaking havoc on some of the bean and corn fields that were planted into it, but kind of a normal thing with cover crop, I think. Yeah, I agree. And seed corn maggot, you know, had a pretty good run early in the year too, which we hadn't seen those in quite a few years. I think the treatment did a good job of stopping those, it seems like. So that was a good win. What do you think about SDS coming in with all this wet weather early on? You know, it's going to be a long time probably before we figure it out, but that's always a threat when we get early wet spring. Yeah, we had a lot of cool and wet come in after we had soybeans in the ground. It's definitely one I'm going to be scouting for this year. There's really no rescue treatment for SDS, unfortunately. Their best protection there also continues to be a seed treatment that's effective against that, but it feels that if it historically had SDS or maybe got planted into those conditions favorable for SDS, I agree with you. I think we need to be keeping an eye on those. There's not a whole lot we can do about it, but it does give us information going into next year. So if we see it, maybe we made the decision not to use a treated soybean, that might be a decision we want to rethink in fields that do end up getting some pressure from it this year. Oh, very good. Oh, I appreciate your time, Jesse. I think we'll end this here. And I'm Ben Whaley, Southern Iowa Agronomist. And this is the We're All Ears podcast. This is Golden Harvest, We're All Ears. We look forward to having you join our next episode. Don't miss it by subscribing to We're All Ears on your preferred podcast streaming platform. And remember, just like you're listening, we're listening too. So join the conversation and interact with us at Golden Harvest on Facebook or Twitter, or at Golden Harvest Seeds on Instagram. We'd love to hear what you think. Thanks for taking the time to be with us on this episode of We're All Ears. The next episode will be coming soon.

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• Jun 07, 2024

  E028: Focus Friday: Agronomic Update and Soybean Flowering

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Charles Scovill, gives a crop progress update along with talking about potential crop issues he has been seeing in the field this week in Michigan. Charles is joined this week by Soybean Product Placement Scientist, Matt Hooyer, to talk about all things soybean flowering. Listen in for this great discussion!

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  13 min

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist with your Focus Friday here on June the 7th, 2024. In this week's podcast, I will be covering the following items. One, going to talk about an update on crop progress across Michigan. Two, going to give you some agronomic lessons from service calls across the state, including a black cutworm update, a slug update, and even some sulfur thoughts for side dressing. And I have a special guest from Canada with us to discuss soybean flowering. So let's get started on crop progress. It is kind of variable across the state, but mainly pretty good. Most of the early corn is pushing V4, V5, with some folks still putting corn in the ground. According to the GHX app, the corn planted May the 1st in central Michigan should have picked up 469 heat units. That's going to put it firmly at a V4 growth stage. And for the most part, the color and uniformity of the corn crop looks very good. The usual problem areas are showing up, including kind of those clay knob hills where the soils might not have been properly fit or the planter just rode up out of the ground a little bit, leaving some seeds shallower than was really needed to get good germination. Soybeans are a little more variable. Rode beans are looking better than the drilled beans. And though we have some early beans pushing that V3 plus, most what I'm seeing is not quite that far along. Now we're only two weeks, of course, away from summer solstice, so the vegetative growth is in full swing right now. Rain this week was scattered, reports of a half an inch here at my place in mid Michigan to an inch and three quarters down by Jackson and honestly over four inches of rain in the far northeast part of the Thumb was reported Wednesday evening. They're in a little tougher shape than the rest of us. So temperatures though were way above average this week, back high enough to create some rapid growth syndrome in some corn near Lowell I was looking at. But things look to be cooling down this next week. So moving into service calls for this week, I've gotten certainly a number of reports on black cutworm across the state. Now the threshold for spraying is three to 5% cut plants and two or more larvae that are what they call fourth to sixth in star growth stage. And that's found in 100 plants. And we're going to do that across multiple places of the field, of course. And we've seen some cutting above the ground and that's really more cosmetic in nature. But if they've been cutting below the ground and potentially below the growing point, which they do tend to do a little bit more in this hot weather, then these fields really need to be scouted and evaluated for spraying before replant becomes our only option in those fields. The first fields, of course, to scout are those that were green. I had green material in them in April when those moths were flying in from the south and laying their eggs. So I've also seen some slug feeding in mainly no-till corn and soybean fields where it's kind of been wet. The plants have been a little slow growing. The good news is most of this damage has been cosmetic, but if it becomes an annual problem on your farm, give me a call. We'll talk through a few management strategies there. Also, with side dress season upon us very quickly, let's not forget to be including the sulfur in with our nitrogen program. You know, most folks agree today that one to two pounds of sulfur for every 10 pounds of nitrogen is a good place to start when applying these truly key nutrients. Now, finally today, I have with me my good friend and colleague from Ontario, Matt Hooyer. He and I have worked together for years and he is our soybean product placement scientist for the Northern Soybean varieties. Welcome, Matt. Thanks, Charles. Glad to be here. And yes, we have worked together for quite some time. Well, really going to enjoy having your insights here today. And let's focus in on flowering in soybeans today. And let's just get a refresher to my listeners on maybe you're taking a minute to explain more about the flowering process in soybeans and truly why it's important to overall yield. Absolutely. So let's start off with timing. So flowering generally starts around summer solstice, but can begin earlier than June 21st. That flowering can continue to up to two months. So quite a time span and duration that flowering can continue across the season. But it's also important to note that this is also variety dependent. So two things just to think about with respect to flowering time. Soybeans are day-length sensitive, which means they respond to day-length, also known as you've probably heard the term photo period, meaning that they begin their reproductive stage when the nights become longer than the days. This is also known as summer solstice. So this is different for each variety. And that's why at Syngenta, we breed soybeans for each maturity group so that it's adapted to maximize its yield potential or those specific regions. So important depending on which region you are and which maturity you are. So you've probably seen this in the past. If you grow a shorter season variety, you'll notice that it will flower faster. And when we say flower faster, it means that the duration of applying will be shorter. Plus you'll get less vegetative growth, meaning less nodes, less flowers, and then ultimately less yield. Now, there's a secondary thing that determines flowering time, and that is temperature. So temperature is also a key driving factor in flowering time. So when we do get warmer temperatures, we get more vegetative growth, meaning more nodes on the plants, resulting again in more flowers, and thus more pods and ultimately more yield at the end of the season. But I just wanted to kind of review here some additional fun facts about the flower. The flower and the soybean plants can be produced on all the stems and branch stones. The number of flowers is highly influenced by the amount of branching. So reason why we might be seeing some things perhaps recently with interest in growing soybeans and mowing soybeans to induce more of that branching. When it comes to the structure of the soybean flower itself, the flower ensures that 98% of soybean pods result from self-pollination. So that's highly accurate amount of pollination that occurs there, which produces about two to three times more flowers than there will be pods that harvest. So a lot of flowers get fertilized, but over the next few weeks will abort for various reasons. So even if we get the perfect rainfall, perfect conditions, we can see up to 50% of flowers aborted after they have been fully fertilized. So that's important to keep in mind as well there too. So as we get into those next few weeks there, then during the seed development, R4, which is beginning seed fill, seeds require a steady flow of water, carbohydrates and nutrients. So any stress, Charles, may increase the rate of seed abortion. That's why the saying goes August rains may grain because August rains occur in that key critical growth stage. So what can we do as growers? We can't control the weather, but what we can do is limit that stress during that time period. So we want to avoid anything that increases stress. So this could include things like a herbicide application. So we want to avoid spraying some herbicides during that R1 and up to the reproductive stages. Additionally, a lot of growers are doing this as well too, is putting on a fungicide application. So we want to manage disease, which causes stress as well. And then finally, we want to make sure that those key nutrients are readily available at that key time. And so that could be a fuller fertilizer application if needed. And then finally, how do we maximize that yield potential with respect to flowering? So finally, one of the key ways to achieve top end yields is planting early. And I mean, there has been a lot of talk, a lot of data here to support the early planting of soybeans. And that makes sense. This allows the soybean the opportunity to put more nodes on each plant by increasing the vegetative growth. So again, here, you'll see me this over and over. More nodes lead to more flowers, lead to more pods, and then ultimately lead to more yield, which is no surprise. Additionally, you'll also notice if you plant early, that even you can have growing even that much earlier, which again, adds to the extra yield opportunity. Well, that's certainly something we're seeing here in Michigan with all kinds of earlier soybean planting, and guys have been successful with it. So we're happy to see that when the soils and the weather allow. Our second question is really curious along this whole line of flowering is what is Syngenta doing with respect to flowering timing and development of soybeans? Right on. So great question. Yeah, we are doing some work with respect to flowering time. So I was talking to Jake Delheimer, who is our breeder out of our Glendon, Minnesota location. So there's a lot of talk about gene editing and we won't get into that today, but very much so we're in the early stages of evaluating the use of gene editing to move around that flowering time. So you think about, Charles, you think about your top performing variety and I know you already got a variety in mind here. So back in the day, you say you had one of your absolute favorite varieties, which was top performing line with second to none white mold. Generally, when we use that top performing line and we bring it back in the breeding program, the progeny are within a narrow band. So the children of that cross from that top performing line are within a narrow band. So you get a spread of plus or minus two days. With gene editing, what's cool, we may be able to bring into other maturities. So you could have an early group two maturity, top performing variety background and bring that into a group three maturity. So with great white mold. So I mean, it's a win-win. Wouldn't that be great? It's exciting, the gene editing in there. It's just crazy what's been done already and what is yet to come. I'm sure we're only at the cusp of where we're going with that. To wrap things up here, finally, I'm just curious, what are you looking most forward to in the near term with research and development? Absolutely. So, you know, my favorite time of year, getting out in the field, seeing our new experimental varieties out there. We know that our current 2.2 maturity variety has been a very successful being. So in our 2024 stage six class, so you know the terminology, Charles, but this is the year before you would run in your plots. We have essentially three experimentals with that variety. So that top performing variety genetics in the background at a 2.3, 2.5 and 2.8. So knowing what we know about performance of that key lead product, I'm excited because that could potentially be a great add to the already strong soybean portfolio. Well, Matt, and we really appreciate all the work that you and your team do behind the scenes to continue to bring out some exciting soybean genetics. I know our customers really appreciate not only the offensive yield potential, but also that defensive protection against a lot of those challenges and diseases that do tend to yield away every year. So I appreciate your time today. And folks, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist with your Focus Friday. Have a great weekend.

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• Jun 05, 2024

  E027: Beyond the Seed: Aerial Imagery Uses from Drones in Crop Fields

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Adam Mayer, is joined by Dresden Lambert, Golden Harvest Developmental Agronomist and Drone Operations Lead to talk about the use of aerial imagery for stand counts and crop scouting. Utilizing drones in crop scouting can be beneficial for identifying potential issues throughout the field.

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  15 min

  Additional Resources

  • Utilizing Aerial Imagery For Agronomic Decisions

  Episode Transcript

  Hello and welcome to the Golden Harvest We're All Ears podcast, where we will feature agronomic insights from across the Midwest to answer pressing questions and help spark discussions. Golden Harvest is dedicated to partnering with farmers to deliver custom solutions for each unique agronomic challenge. Thanks for joining us. Welcome, Adam Mayer here, Golden Harvest Agronomist for Northeast Iowa, South Central, Southeast Minnesota as well, bringing this episode of Beyond the Seed today. We're going to cover our normal crop talk to start out things, and then we're going to transition to a piece about kind of utilizing newer technologies and more specifically around drones. And so I'm going to have a special guest with Dresden Lambert. We're going to see what's going on in Golden Harvest and Syngenta and how we're using drones out in the field. So just to start with what's going on in the field today, for corn, we're really starting to get that nice color we're looking for in the darker green. Man, it was a pretty ugly phase here the last couple weeks. From combination of things, we definitely needed some more sunshine. A lot of things were in saturated soils. We know that ruts need oxygen to live just like anything else. And so we're trying to get some of those areas drained out and help with that. The other thing we need is some sunshine and we did get that in spurts over the last week here. So we're definitely starting to get some better color in areas of fields. And that's the other thing that's definitely not changed is how different, you know, soil types and drainage differences in the fields are really showing up this year. You can also see those tillage passes in a lot of cases. You're in hydrous marks if they were at an angle. If you work the ground at an angle to start the season, whatever the case may be, a lot of those things are definitely showing up here early season. Post spraying has started. If guys were able to get in the field yet, definitely evidenced by the many white flashes I see on those end rows and overlaps where we know that that HPPD was probably on a little heavier in those cases, but for the most part, weed control was good if we had a pre down and now it's time that we get over things again. So if I look at where we're currently at from a heat unit standpoint, from the April 24th planning date, we're now at about 427 heat units and that puts us at that V4 to really that V5 standpoint. So we are going to be bringing that growing point out of the ground from here on. So that makes us much more vulnerable when it comes to snapping that plant off at the base there. We will kill the plant from a hail damage perspective or any other damage when we have that growing point out of the ground. That's much more concerning for us as we move forward on corn here. If I look at the May 12th planting date, we're at about 300 heat units and that puts us that V2 type of category, give or take, and just getting a nice start with that. I'd say overall, a lot of the May planting dates, the stands have been pretty decent as long as it wasn't real saturated or wet in that environment, but otherwise it's been pretty good overall. If I look at GDUs from January 1 till the beginning of the year, we're at about 600 total. And why this is important is for insect pressure. We know that insects also go off of GDUs, that soil temperature is important for their development, for hatch, and one that I'm always worried about is that corn rootworm. And it takes about 700 GDU, give or take, for that hatch to occur. And it also lines up with lightning bugs. So when you see those first lightning bugs outside, while you're roasting your marshmallows, that is the first time that you're going to see the hatch of corn rootworm. And we have started to see a few lightning bugs if you've been out in the evening. So that's pretty indicative that we should be starting to do some root digs. And with that, do some floats, wash those roots off in a pail and see how many of those root worms are floating to the top to understand what kind of pressures we have out there. If you need help with that, I know I'd be happy to help as well as some other seed advisors. The only thing I've gotten a lot of questions about when it comes to corn rootworm is around those eggs and larvae and how they are able to survive in wet or saturated conditions. And I will say that eggs actually can survive. What we want to do is drown the larvae. But in the egg stage, they can kind of float and stay dormant there and probably are a little better off. It's probably more beneficial for drowning if we do get to the larval stage. So we're going to need more June rains if you really want to drown them. But I think we've probably had enough here to take a few weeks off from getting much more moisture here. So I just wanted to level set that question that I've been getting around corn rootworm. On the soybean side, just kind of getting going there as well. Got a few trifoliate coming out on those real early plantings. For the most part, stands have been reasonable and it's kind of starting to take off there as well. So just being on the watch out for a few of those chewing, feeding insects on that side as well. With that, I'd like to dive into our next topic here. And I'd like to introduce Dresden Lambert, who is Developmental Agronomist in our Agronomy Department here. And these are local UAV experts. So I'm going to go ahead and let Dresden introduce yourself and give us a little background of where you're coming from geography and maybe some education and just to give our listeners a little color commentary of where you're coming from. Yeah, absolutely. As Adam said, Dresden Lambert from West Central Wisconsin, currently the Developmental Agronomist for Syngenta, did my undergrad at University of Wisconsin, River Falls, and I'm currently just finishing up my first year in the Master of Crop Sciences program at Illinois. And as the Developmental Agronomist, I get to oversee the drone operations that we have. Awesome. Well, let's dive right into that then. So, at Golden Harvest or Syngenta, what are we doing with drones early in the season and how are you helping out growers with drones out in the field? Yeah, absolutely, Adam. Right now, the most common thing we do are stand count flights. Right now, we are doing stand counts at V2, V3. So it's a lot faster than doing a physical stand count where you mark off 17 and a half feet. If you're on 30-inch rows, we can do about 160 acres in about 10 minutes, give or take. And this gives us a really good idea on how the overall field is. If you're doing a physical stand count, you have to walk, try and pick out and not be biased on good areas, bad areas. A drone stand count, we're going to take around 16 to 20 pictures, depending on how big the field size is. And then we're going to take those results. They get sent to the software we use, Drone Deploy, and they analyze it, send it back to us with a stand count and an estimated population. From there, when we see a low stand count or a high stand count or a stand count that doesn't get registered, we have then identified our problem and we can go out there and scout physically. So it kind of just helps us narrow down those problem areas in the field. We also have the option to do manual flights that if a grower has water standing, sometimes they like a quick picture just to see how much the field is actually under water. And then we can kind of see how fast that water gets absorbed over time by taking another flight two or three days later. Absolutely. There's quite a bit of value here early season and I think, you know, using technology is great, but we also have to make sure we're ground truthing everything that happens out there because we know that just like the internet, you can't always believe what you read on the internet. Probably can't always trust technology. So we got to make sure that we ground truth all this as well. So you mentioned that that stand count and some of those other flights we're doing up until probably that V5 timeframe and then that doesn't work quite as well. What I understand it likes to take the count from the world and as we get the canopy it kind of cover some of that up so it's not as easy for the software to identify it. But what happens when we get after that V5 timeframe, which some of this stuff is getting there pretty quickly. What kind of lights will be doing in the coming weeks and months here with horn? I like how you mentioned that after we get to that kind of V5 timeframe that the software can't identify the world of the plant. That's because as soon as the leaves begin to overlap with each other and almost get to that canopy just within the row, it's really hard for any kind of software to identify individual plants. And then after that V5, kind of when we have somewhat of a canopy, we're able to do plant health plates. So as soon as that soil is covered, we get a RVI imagery. So it's very similar to NDVI imagery, it's just our cameras aren't adjusted to NDVI. With that, though, it gives us a great understanding all the way up until harvest. So we can do those flights anytime after V5 until harvest to see how that plant's doing. It's really interesting to see to prior to a fungicide application, a plant health flight, and then after that fungicide application to do another plant health flight and see how much that benefits. Another option we can do is a panoramic flight. So panoramic flights are nice in terms of scouting and any kind of insurance issues is the best way to put it. It's a really good way just to get up and get a 360 view of the entire field. And from there, we can identify any kind of different cases that are across the entire field. I know a few of our agronomists in Nebraska have used these panoramic flights for green snap cases. So they were able to go up about 150 feet, give or take, depending on the field size, and they were able to identify how much of the field had been affected by green snap. Perfect. Sounds like a lot of utility with both of those flight types. I will say I've had some experience there doing some NDVI imagery there, and it does provide some good insight, but you always have to remember that it is relative to self or relative to what you're, the field you're doing. The other thing I noticed is there's quite a difference in hybrid and what it'll show up. If you had a side by side, there may be times where one may show up a lot greener than the other, or one almost yellow to red. And that's probably more around its leaf architecture and type, but it could be plant health. But sometimes there's other things that kind of play with it. Hence back to that ground truthing and understanding on what's actually going on in the field. So yeah, that's pretty fun light that I like to use when we get later in the season, just to see how much variability is out there and how well we're doing for a mid season report card. Is there anything else, Dresden, from a drone perspective, anything new or exciting on the horizon that we may be doing within Syngenta or elsewhere in the industry that you know of that you think is worth noting or you're excited about? Yeah. So what I'm most excited about this year is the software that we use is called Drone Deploy. And they have a software that allows us to use a new drone by DJI called the Mavic 3 Enterprise to do stand counts at emergence up to V1. So it's a little bit different flight type than what we're doing anywhere from V2 to V4. But I've had some experience with it so far. And this thing is able to pick out spikes as soon as they come out of the ground. In heavy cover crop situations and high residue areas, it was really hard. So I flew some fields down in Iowa where there was some flooding. And when all that residue got pushed into one area, it wasn't able to pick out the spikes as they were coming out of the ground. But when we walked over there, we could identify them ourselves. But that's what's coming on the horizon. Eventually, they will be transitioning that to soybeans as well. Right now, it's only on corn, but soon to be soybeans, hopefully. That would be awesome, because then we can make a little more timely decisions if we do see those spots that are blank or bare. So right at that emergence would be awesome. I appreciate you joining me today, Dresden. It was some great information around what we're doing with drones. And hopefully we can get out and about and get some good grower experience with this technology. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a lot, Dresden. With that, I think we'll go ahead and wrap up this Beyond the Seeds series podcast for today. And thanks for joining. We'll talk to you next time. It has been great to have you with us on this podcast. This has been Golden Harvest We're All Ears. You won't want to miss our upcoming episodes, so subscribe to We're All Ears on your preferred podcast streaming platform. And remember, just like you're listening, we're listening too. So join the conversation and interact with us at Golden Harvest on Facebook or Twitter or at Golden Harvest Seeds on Instagram and tell us what you thought of the episode. Thanks for listening to We're All Ears. We'll catch you in the next episode.

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• Jun 04, 2024

  E026: Cultivating Success: Nitrogen Loss and Yellow Corn

  Join Golden Harvest Agronomist, Andrew Rupe, in this Cultivating Success episode to hear about nitrogen in soils this year and the impact on corn. Environmental conditions have been different this year cross the Corn Belt, leading to potential nitrogen loss compared to last year.

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  09 min

  Additional Resources

  • Golden Harvest Agronomy
  • Managing Nitrogen Use Efficiency
  • Hybrid Tolerance Rescue Nitrogen Saturated Soils

  Episode Transcript

  Hello folks, thanks for tuning in to the We're All Ears podcast, and this sub-series, Cultivating Success. My name is Andrew Rupe, Golden Harvest Agronomist, covering East Central Iowa. And today's podcast, we're going to talk a little bit about in-season nitrogen management, and some of this pale-ish, yellowish corn that we're seeing out in the countryside. This year in Northeast Iowa and East Central Iowa, we've seen a lot of moisture come our way. It's been nice to get a little replenishment of moisture. But with that, we're seeing some things in our corn crop that is leading to maybe a little bit more stress than we typically seen. So each year, right around this early June time period, we typically see some of the early planted corn transition from that seminal root system, so that root system that's really put out early, just from the seedling itself. And then we're transitioning from that to the nodal root system, where we're stacking root nodes on top, and we're actually using that root system to act as some of the fertility that is in the soil itself, that we're trying to provide to that corn crop out in the field. When we transition to the nodal root system, sometimes that nodal root system just doesn't have enough mass to fully access some of the fertility that we've supplied out to our soils. So, sometimes whenever we see that, we see yellow and green streaks out in a field. We see some areas of the field that just look a little bit more peaked out there. And a lot of times that just may be because we're undergoing that transitional phase. Some people like to call this that ugly corn phase out in the field. And usually within a week to two weeks, we can kind of bounce out of it because the root system gets big enough where it actually starts to tap into some of the nitrogen and some of the other fertilizers that are out in the soil. This year, it's just taken a little bit longer to kind of bounce out of that. And then also we've got some environmental conditions that have led to some of the losses and some of the impacts that we see out in our fields. So tracing back to what we experienced in Eastern Iowa and in many areas of the Corn Belt last winter is we had a very, very warm winter. A typical winter will typically be much colder and we actually hold on to more of the ammonium form of nitrogen in our soils if we applied fertilizer in the fall. So if we did some fall anhydrous, then we'll typically hold on to that ammonium form of nitrogen longer through the winter and then once spring hits, we'll hit more of that transition from ammonium to nitrate conversion. However, we had a warmer winter. We may have had a little bit more of an increase of this conversion over the winter and we've actually got some nitrate conversion and remember nitrate is much more subject to loss. We can lose it through two methods, leaching and denitrification and that's something that we're also seeing this spring even if we did not have fall applied anhydrous. We've got saturated soils out there in some situations and when we have saturated soils near the surface, that's whenever we can run into denitrification losses. Denitrification is that process in which nitrate is lost when the soil is saturated and we have higher air temperatures. So if we have air temperatures that are up near 65, 70, 75 degrees, that's whenever we can get a lot more nitrogen loss at the surface. Basically, that nitrate converts back to nitrite and then undergoes a few more chemical reaction changes and is lost to the atmosphere via N2 gas. That's one way that we can lose it. And then the other way is through leaching. And leaching happens basically when we get a lot of moisture that drains through the soil profile. And as that moisture goes down the soil profile, it may detach some of those nitrate anions and carry it with them down the soil profile. Sometimes that rainfall might just push that nitrate further down, and sometimes it pushes it all the way through the soil and then out by lines and drain water and things like that and may actually be lost in some situations. So those are some conditions that we could be experiencing that may be enhancing some of this yellow corn out in our fields. One of the other things that might be happening that can impact the amount of nitrate uptake by our crop is the fact that we have had a lot of moisture out in our fields, and if we remember, corn roots are somewhat kind of lazy, and if we've got a lot of moisture near the surface, it doesn't necessarily need to send its roots further down to access more moisture. When that happens, they might just sit a little bit more up near the surface and may not really be reaching down to access some of that nitrate that's been pushed down by the rainfall. So those are some of the conditions why we might be seeing a little bit more yellow corn out in some of our corn fields this year. So one of the questions that I have been fielding for about the past week are guys that typically do a split application of nitrogen in their crop during the year, but they usually wait a little bit longer to put that second application of nitrogen out in their fields. However, their corn is looking really tough and yellow this year, and they're asking me if, do you think I should bump up my application of nitrogen this year? And in most situations, I've been saying yes. You know, we really don't like to see that corn crop having a bad day. Anytime it's looking a little bit rough or yellow, we're probably losing some yield potential out in that corn crop. So my answer has typically been yes, let's bump up that nitrogen application just a little bit so that we kind of kickstart that corn crop, get it a little bit more green. That way it can actually be a little bit more efficient on its photosynthesis activity. The last point that I wanted to make is that a lot of people are considering using nitrogen stabilizers or are using nitrogen stabilizers in their nitrogen program. Now, there are a few different types of nitrogen stabilizers out there. There are urease inhibitors, and those are typically more effective when we're worried about dry conditions or dry soils. They're used a lot of times with products like urea, whenever we're blowing that over the top of the crop, and basically relying on moisture or incorporation to get that nitrogen into the soil. And then there are also nitrification inhibitors, and those ones basically slow the conversion of ammonium to nitrate. And they're most effective when heavy rainfall occurs that we could see losses of nitrate, and we want to slow that process down a little bit. Whether we're worried about leaching or denitrification, that's kind of where we're most likely using a nitrification inhibitor. I will say I'm a fan of using nitrogen stabilizers in most situations. However, one thing that we may want to consider is that if we're trying to bump this corn out of its ugly corn phase in this yellowish corn, a nitrogen stabilizer might impact the availability of that nitrogen if we really want to feed it right away. So you got to kind of basically assess, you know, does this corn need this nitrogen right now? And if that's the case, maybe we consider pulling out that stabilizer in some situations. Now, if the corn is pretty green and healthy and we're just trying to get it out there to pack its groceries for late in the season, then I'm all for using a stabilizer, keeping it in a more stable form until we get later in the season whenever that corn crop's really going to need to be up taking a lot of nitrogen and we need to pack those groceries on for later in the year. Appreciate you guys for tuning in to this week's episode of We're All Ears. If you've got any questions about this topic, reach out to your local Golden Harvest Seed Advisor, sales rep, GHX specialist or agronomist. We'll catch you next time.

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• Jun 03, 2024

  E025: Kernels of Agronomy: Sulfur, Slugs, and Bugs

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Wayde Looker, discusses what he is seeing in crop fields this week along with considerations for sulfur applications. Slugs and some bugs are showing up in crop fields in Ohio, so make sure you're out scouting your fields and making management plans.

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  09 min

  Episode Transcript

  Welcome back to the Golden Harvest, We're All Ears podcast, where we will feature agronomic insights from across the Midwest to answer pressing questions and help spark discussions. Thanks for joining us. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Kernels of Agronomy. I'm your host, Wayde Looker. I am the agronomist for Golden Harvest, covering Ohio and all things East. And today, I have a packed show for you. A lot has been going on in the world of agronomy. So we do have a lot of information to get into. But first, let's take a quick recap of where things are at here across our geography. Rain led up for most of last week. Today is May 30th. So last week wound up being pretty dry, which it gave our farmers in Northern Ohio an opportunity to get quite a bit done. And they really took advantage of that opportunity. So kudos to them. We are still finishing up in the rest of the areas of the state, probably the last 15% or so across the remainder of the state. A lot of the crop is looking good. So we had a lot of really good heat last week, which has resulted in quick growth for our crops, particularly our corn. Some of the early planted corn, in fact, is approaching that V5, if not already at that important V5 stage. So very exciting things there. This is the point of the year where a lot of different field activities are being done at the same time. Obviously, we still have quite a few guys that are finishing up planting, myself being one of them. So we have guys again, going out there in the fields and trying to get the crop in the ground. But then we also have guys that are to the point now where we're side dressing. And again, we have that critical V5 stage coming for our corn. And so you'll have guys starting to make foliar applications of foliar nutrients, as well as foliar fungicides. So I wanted to take a few minutes and go through some of that here today, just to underline the importance of some of those activities and how to best utilize those if that is indeed one of the activities that you're about to do. So for side dress, obviously everyone is side dressing nitrogen, but one thing to keep in mind is this is an opportune time, especially if you're using 28 or urea, of incorporating some sulfur into your program. Sulfur is really, really important. It's something that is mobile in the soil, so we often leach it out. And so I usually think of it just like nitrogen. We want to do split applications with it. And really anytime that you're out there making a nitrogen application, it's a good time to use some sulfur. So if you're spreading urea, feel free to use some AMS, some ammonium sulfate in there. Or if you're using liquid 28, that's a great time to incorporate some ammonium thiosulfate there as well. I like to run at least a 10 to 1 ratio, so one pound of actual sulfur for every 10 pounds of actual N. There are guys that are quite aggressive that can drop that ratio down to, say, six pounds of nitrogen for every pound of sulfur. So six to one to 10 to one, somewhere in there is where you want to be, but it really is a great opportunity to get some sulfur into your program. The other thing that is approaching really quick, if not already here in some select fields, is the all important V5 growth stage with corn. So three really important things happen at that V5 growth stage. One is that plant has really moved on from living on the seed to now living off of the root system that it has. And so sometimes you can see a little bit of striping. Once again, that is indicative of sulfur and another very important reason why we need to have sulfur into our mix. That way we can make sure that that corn plant is as happy and healthy as possible at that V5 growth stage. And it is very important to have that corn plant as happy and healthy as possible at that V5 growth stage, because that is when your corn plant determines the maximum rows around on that ear. So we really want that plant to have the least amount of stress possible at that critical timeframe, because we're trying to gain two more rows on that ear come harvest. That's also why we are going after the fungicide piece on this too. Strobilurin fungicides in particular have really nice plant health benefits and can reduce stress. And so by applying those fungicides at that V5 timeframe, we're trying to reduce stress in order to gain those two extra rows around. That's the goal with that application. Personally, I don't think we need to spend money on the really, really high end mixed products with triazoles and SDHI's and stuff, because at this point in time, usually we don't have much in the way of foliar diseases. And we really are just trying to get that strobilurin component in order to reduce stress on that plant. So that's the goal with the V5 application. The other critical thing that is going on at the V5 timeframe is the growing point emerges from the ground. So up until really the V5 timeframe, theoretically you could go out there, mow the whole field off and it would grow back because that growing point is protected beneath the soil surface. Now that that growing point has emerged at that V5 timeframe, you know, it does become a little bit more at risk for things like hail events, things like that. So those are really the three main things at the V5 timeframe that are very critical for corn. V7 to V8, that timeframe is when corn starts determining the maximum length of the ear. So again, another important timeframe that's coming up rather quickly as well. On the soybean front, boy oh boy, it's been a while since I've seen this much slug pressure. Some of these cloudy and rainy days, the slugs have really liked, and they've really started to proliferate quite a bit. So get out there, scout your fields, make sure that you have an adequate stand because the slugs have been doing quite a number on a lot of our soybean fields, particularly areas with heavy residue. So if you're planting into corn stalks, no tilling into corn stalks, no tilling into other heavy residue fields, get out there and make sure you have an adequate stand because slugs have been feeding hot and heavy of late. There's not a lot of really great options on reducing slug pressure. Tillage is one. If you're able to remove that residue from the soil surface, you're essentially reducing the number of places that slugs can hide from the heat and sunshine of the day. Slugs don't like to dry out. Therefore, if you're able to remove their hiding places underneath residue, underneath corn stalks, then that does help reduce the slug pressure. There are baits that folks have used in the past. You know, I've heard mixed reviews on those and they do tend to be rather expensive. So the biggest key is just to make sure you're putting enough beans out there. Check, make sure that you have an adequate population once they start to come up. Once we get some of these hot and sunny days, beans can start to grow pretty quick and that generally reduces the amount of slug pressure as well. Another important thing that's going on across our geography right now is we've had quite a bit of black cutworm pressure. We've had above average temperatures for this point in the year. But if you look at the number of GDUs that we have accumulated really since February, it's been quite high. Normally, we associate GDUs and heat accumulation with corn. However, insects actually, they mature in the same way with heat accumulation. And so with the higher than normal GDUs that we've accumulated this far, we're starting to see some of these pests already. I've got numerous calls on black cutworm, both in corn and actually in some soybeans as well. And so they're certainly out and about. So if you're seeing issues out there, maybe consider using a Viptera trait in the future. One really effective way is spraying an insecticide. So keep on the lookout for black cutworm because it's out there in those fields as well. So with that, that is going to be a wrap on the Kernels of Agronomy podcast. I'm your host, Wayde Looker. I want to thank you for tuning in and stay tuned for the next edition coming up soon. Thanks. It has been great to have you with us on this podcast. This has been Golden Harvest, We're All Ears. You won't want to miss our upcoming episodes. So subscribe to We're All Ears on your preferred podcast streaming platform. And remember, just like you're listening, we're listening too. So join the conversation and interact with us at Golden Harvest on Facebook or Twitter, or at Golden Harvest Seeds on Instagram and tell us what you thought of the episode. Thanks for listening to We're All Ears. We'll catch you in the next episode.

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• May 31, 2024

  E024: Focus Friday: Early Season Insect Pests

  This week, Golden Harvest Agronomist, Charles Scovill, is joined by Chris DiFonzo, Professor and Field Crops Entomologist at Michigan State University, to talk about early season insect pests, mostly on soybeans, that they've been seeing in the field and what could be done about them. Check in with their conversation and also hear a brief update from Charles on what he's been seeing in Michigan crop fields this week.

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  15 min

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist, with your Focus Friday, here on May the 31st. Today, we're going to hit an update on crop progress across Michigan, give you a little insight on some of the service calls I've made this week, and we have another special guest with us, Dr. Chris DiFonzo from MSU, going to give us an idea of all the bugs that we may be seeing here right now and in the near future. So, for the area update, according to the GHX app, we are at 393 heat units since that initial corn that we talked about planting in the early time period, and quite honestly, if that was real corn, that would be at V4 right now, and so it's kind of exciting. The reality of most of the corn I'm seeing around the state is V1, maybe a little V2, and unfortunately, there's still some corn yet to be planted and a little bit at a VE, but as we think ahead on that, we're not all that far from V5 corn, and of course, V5 corn, where we got five of those leaf collars on there, is extremely important to production because that is when we're setting those rows around, and so we really want to make sure that corn is not having a bad day, so it thinks it's got all kinds of top-end yield potential to put in there, and of course, shortly after that, we'll be setting those rows long on those ears. The other thing is the overwintering crops, things like hay and wheat. I had a good chance to talk with Dennis Pennington the other day, and he said, according to his notes, that wheat is flowering 11 days ahead of schedule. So crops are moving along, and I think if you're even considering or have done double-crop soybeans in the past, if we get some moisture, this might be a year we could make that happen. Also seen a lot of hay cut out there. Mine, thankfully, is cut and in the barn. I don't do a lot of it, but it's good to have it there, and hopefully we get a few more dry days for folks to get theirs up if they don't have it in already. Service call update. Soybeans have been the service calls this year. A little bit of soybean replant out there, and every year there's a couple of days you look back and say, probably shouldn't have planted those days. This year, it was soybeans planted May 1st through the 5th. Seem to be those that are the popular ones for looking at replant. And the causes, a little bit of crusting out there, especially on those tighter clay soils. Seen a lot of seed corn maggot, and we're going to talk to Chris about that one a little bit. But they are feeding through some of the seed treatment on that corn, but the good news is those fields that have good seed treatment on them are not really needing much in the way of replant. So that's nice to see. Also, finding some good old-fashioned, just planting depth issues. Those guys that push the envelope, maybe soil is a little tighter than they thought. Finding a couple of places where we're finding either the little trenches are not quite closed, we're not getting good soil to seed contact, or we're just not getting the depth on them and laying seed on top of the ground. So always good things to catch out there, but now is the time to get out of the truck and get in those fields and do that scouting, especially if you had some of that soybean planted in that first part of May. On to our special guest today. We do have with us Dr. Chris DiFonzo from Michigan State University in the Entomology Department there. She has been a tremendous friend to agriculture and to us here at Golden Harvest. And so, Chris, good morning. Welcome. Good morning. Glad to be on. Well, a couple of things I just want to talk with you about because it just seems like we've seen a lot of pests so far this year. I've got a couple of questions go through. And the first is, you know, I have made numerous potential replant calls on soybeans with seed corn, maggot damage this spring. And I'm curious, why is it so bad this year? And what can we do about it for next year? Well, you know, most of the calls I've been getting have been in beans. And until the last few years, I never had calls in beans. I mean, it was pretty rare, maybe a little bit of feeding on that cotyledon, but the last couple of years, just a lot of calls. And I would not say it's the badness of the year. I would flip it and say that we humans are planting into fly risk like never before. So I think there's a combination of two things happening. We have milder winters, we're warming up earlier and then we're planting, we're pushing that planting window earlier, especially for beans. So what's happening is we're not getting kill of cover crops or we have a lot of winter annual weeds and then people are spraying a herbicide trying to work them in. And then they want to plant right away when really you need to let that material break completely down and if you don't, then you're planting into decaying stuff, which is exactly what the fly is going for to lay eggs. She's not laying eggs in the crop, she's laying eggs in rotting, green fresh rotting stuff essentially. So we're trying to push that window. I've had calls where cover crops just didn't die over the winter as efficiently as they should have. And then again, that grower was planting in April. So we're planting a little bit earlier. We're planting too close to the time where weeds were tilled in or killed. We're planting right over top when those flies normally first emerge and lay eggs, which is typically probably mid to late April. We're planting too deep. You already mentioned that we've had some issues with that. And the seed is taking a long time to get out of the ground. And then, you know, it's being attacked by these seed corn maggots. And then, the final thing about beans is if you read a seed treatment label really carefully, the seed treaters label, you find there's a per acre rate for that seed treatment. And if you divide that rate out per kernel on corn or per seed in beans, you find that the rate on beans per bean is less than that rate per kernel. So the amount of seed treatment would be less on that individual seed. And seed treatments aren't magic. So I've seen pictures of seven maggots attacking one soybean. That's just a hard lift for that seed treatment. And that's a person that planted right on the date of peak fly emergence. So I attribute it to doing things different than what we've normally been doing 30 years ago, say. Well, Chris, that is really good insight as we think about that, because we are planting soybeans earlier. And when we do that, we are planting them deeper. And those are all important things to do to be successful in early planted soybeans. But yeah, managing that cover crop and certainly making sure we've got a good seed treatment out there to at least have the best chance of getting those beans up. If you're going to plant earlier, then that margin for weed control, really, ideally, you'd want to wait two to three weeks after you killed and tilled in stuff. Right? And so, but if you're planting earlier, you don't have those two to three weeks. So you're risking it. And the flies have emerged now because I was out on South Campus here and there were just tons of these. They're not the size of a regular house fly. They're like half the size. They're like a mini house fly. And there were just thousands of them on my car and everywhere. And I realized, I think that seed corn maggot adult flies flying. So they're emerging now. Well, absolutely. In fact, I was just north of Grand Rapids yesterday and in a field that had a pile of seed corn maggot damage. And these flies were just literally on the ground. They hadn't even been emerging long enough to have the wings dried off to take flight. But yeah, and if a guy was going to replant, at this point, that fly risk is very low because the green stuff's already decayed and it's warm and the seeds can get out of the ground fast. So if they're going to do a seed treatment and they're trying to shave a little bit of money there, maybe the fungicide part of the seed treatment or the nematocyte part and the insecticide part would not be necessary, at least for the seed corn maggot at this point. Very good. Well, you mentioned earlier a mild winter and I guess I always think a lot about corn rootworm this time of the year as we're going to be expecting some of that hatch before too long. What do you think about the rootworm pressure for this year, especially with the heat units being so far ahead? It could be a little earlier. Like, I know our pupation on things like Asiatic Garden Beetle is about, you were talking about something being 11 days ahead or something like that. The wheat flowering. So we were about 10 days ahead on some of the grub kind of development. But I don't think that the mild winters would necessarily, if it's super cold, yeah, you can affect survival of corn rootworm. But if you're corn on corn on corn on corn, which is your, that's your risk for corn rootworm, you know, cold or not, the risk is the corn on corn on corn on corn building those populations. So I think if you're really risky and you've been corned for 10, 20 years or forever, I don't think it being a mild winter is increasing your risk necessarily. So I just think the bigger risk is the lack of crop rotation continuously. No, I think you're right there. And you know, I was talking to my colleagues out west here earlier this morning. In fact, you're seeing the hatch of lightning bugs already in it, you know, tends to follow the hatch similarly to the hatch of rootworms. About the same, about the same degree days. So, so you could have a little bit of an earlier start if you've got your BT corn out there and it's still working, which we assume in Michigan, we're pretty good and we do still have good efficacy on those BT varieties or potentially a high rate of seed treatment or whatever, you know, that should do what it can. But in those situations where it's a 10 year corn on corn field, you know, the solution there is to get crop rotation into the mix, at least every few years if we possibly can. Say the last question I've got as we wrap things up here today is just for my listeners here wondering what's the next thing that we need to be scouting for in the next couple of weeks so we don't get surprised by what the next insect is going to be out there. I made a list for you. So that's good. So I've seen I've gotten some pictures of true armyworm and they were like nickel sized if they were kind of curled up and that's still small enough to get decent control. So if you've got wheat and corn, if you don't trap, it's hard to know that you got a dump of moths upon you. But as you're walking those fields for stripe rust or whatever else is going on, just look for that tattered feeding and look on the ground and look for the big hoop pellets that they leave behind. And if you can get them when they're smaller, that's very, very sprayable. You mentioned alfalfa getting cut, and the next thing in there is going to be potato leaf hopper management. Get out your sweep net. It's an easy pest to control, but a big yield loser if you don't. When you see yellowing, you're already losing, so it's really easy to kill. And of course, you know, we haven't had soybean aphid for a very long time. I mean, it's always here, but not in huge numbers, and it'll start colonizing, especially when we were planting soybeans earlier. And a lot of those early populations, even if they come up a bit on your beans and they look kind of like, oh, there's a lot of things there, boy, do those recruit in the natural enemies. And typically the reason we haven't sprayed for years and years and years is we have a great group of natural enemies out there, wiping these things out. So if you're going to spend money on something, I'm hoping it's not that, that maybe you need fungicide later. Something more important later and don't spend it on insecticide you don't need now. So that's my final message. Now, you didn't mention black cutworm. I'm just curious if you think we've got much risk for that this year, because I've seen a lot of those weedy fields. And boy, when I think about where cutworm are going to land and lay, it just feels like there's fields available. The cutworm flights have been done for quite a while. So I assume if somebody, if it's out there, somebody would have seen it. But outside of black cutworm, we've seen a lot of other things that look like it's cutting, but it's not, that's not really, it's not really black cutworm, it's something else. On beans, it looks like the hypocotyl is trying to come out of the ground and it's getting stuck and it's breaking off. And people are saying, oh, it's black cutworm. And you look and there's a cotyledon stuck under the ground. Kristy Sprague and I did a lot of digging yesterday and found a lot of that. Or it's deer damage. Oh, absolutely. Which are four footed cutworm. But those will just mow down a row. I mean, a cutworm is not that smart to just follow one row. So there could be some out there and they would be in the same locations as true armyworm and corn. Those very weedy, as you pointed out, weed control issues early. And I did get a picture actually sent to me yesterday from southwest Michigan with some black cutworm in there. They could be mixed together. And a lot of times, a person sprays and they look out in the field now and it looks clean and they forget that three and a half weeks ago or four weeks ago, they sprayed that and it was full of winter annuals, but they forget in their mind. And that's when this happened is three weeks ago. Absolutely. Well, Chris, great advice as always. I appreciate your time on the call here today. And the key is just get out there and scout, walk those fields, take a look and then respond accordingly. So again, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist with your Focus Friday. Have a great weekend.

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• May 30, 2024

  E023: Beyond the Seed: Postemergence Herbicide Application Considerations for this Season

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Adam Mayer, is joined this week by Dean Grossnickle, Syngenta Crop Protection Technical Development Lead, to discuss postemergence herbicide application considerations, including environment, herbicide residual, weed size and application timing. Listen in to their conversation around this important topic and hear about the differences from last year to this year.

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  15 min

  Episode Transcript

  Welcome back to the Beyond the Seeds series as part of our We're All Ears podcast. I'm your host, Adam Mayer, Golden Harvest Agronomist, covering Northeast Iowa and Southern Minnesota. I have a couple topics today. First, I want to cover that current state of our crop out there today and some observations around that. And then I've got a special guest today with Dean Grossnickle, and we're going to cover some herbicide post-spraying best practices and go over some things and considerations around that. So to start things out, we're at about 362 GDUs from something that was planted on April 23rd, as far as corn goes, and that puts us in that V3 to V4 type time frame. So we're getting close to that switch over to our nodal root system with that corn there, and therefore we've got some ugly duckling stage corn out there for sure, especially a lot of that seed energy is used up at this point. So hopefully we can get switched over quickly on that. If I look at a little bit later planting date with May 14th, we're at about just shy of 200 GDUs with that planting date, which puts us at that V1 stage there. So we're not too far behind with the later planting date there, but just a little bit behind developmentally. A few observations as I've been out and about here looking at things the last couple of weeks. Planting depth for corn in several cases has not been exactly where we want it to be or where the grower thought it was going to be. And causes of that have been very different or numerous depending on situation. There's been some planter bounce issues that we probably didn't have quite enough downforce on. A lot of the stuff was pretty fluffy when it was worked in pretty mellow, nice conditions there. And sometimes that fluffy soil also settled pretty heavily with some of these heavier rains and we were shallower than we thought. But luckily with that unevenness, we've had moisture throughout and actually helped with a more uniform emergence than could have been the case. So definitely been seeing some things with that planting depth thing that could provide issues later in the season. On corn weather, watch out, I've seen some armyworm that has come into some no-till fields in Iowa in particular, but I don't think it really matters on the geography. Anything that had some nice green living crop is susceptible to having that hatch and then the subsequent feeding there along with armyworm, black cutworms, our other watch out of that migratory pest that is probably going to be doing some cutting here pretty soon. So definitely be on the watch out for that stand loss from that migratory pest there. On the soybean side, we have developmentally fields that are ranging from just that emergence, they're coming popping through the ground all the way to that first trifoliate, maybe getting to the second trifoliate. Recently, for issues with soybeans have continued to see or hear some issues with some PPOs and some of that girdling effect, especially with heavy rains and some of that, you know, that hook sitting in that AI zone for longer than we like and that can cause some issues. Also, some insect feedings have been seen on some soybeans as well. So there's plenty of things to be cognizant of and be out and about taking a look at things there. So the other thing I've been seeing in a lot of fields is there are definitely weeds present. So not only is our corn crop and soybean crops growing, but the weeds are doing the same thing. In some cases, the competitive nature of the weeds is actually overtaking. So we're well on our way to needing some treatments there. And hopefully we can get a window to get that done. So this really leads me into our next topic here. So I'd like to welcome Dean Grossnickle, who is a technical development lead for the crop protection side of the Syngenta business. So Dean, I'd like to invite you just to maybe give a little background on why you're smarter than me on this crop protection side and what you can provide for insight here to the grower listeners out here. I don't know if I'm smarter than you, Adam, but definitely I've had a few experiences in the crop protection world for sure. As you said, Dean Grossnickle, technical development lead. Prior to this role within Syngenta, I was an agronomic service rep for Syngenta for approximately 10 years. Prior to that, I worked seven years with Iowa State Weed Science, doing herbicide efficacy trials with that group. So I learned a lot there. And then prior to that, I was eight years in ag retail. So definitely seen a lot of different things and different environments, trying to tackle weed control issues for quite a while. So that's a little bit about my background, and ready to delve into any topics that you want to discuss here, Adam. Perfect. We'll try to get some insights out of your gray hairs here and go from there. So first question here set up, you know, some growers, I'd say have some PTSD from ineffective chemistry activity last year. There were definitely some quite a few escapes in corn and soybeans. And, you know, probably the more surprising part was on corn, which normally we can win on. But I know environment plays, you know, a lot into our herbicide effectiveness. So what adjustments should a grower make based on the weather and environment to help with that herbicide effectiveness? Adam, that's a great question. And you truly are right, right? You know, because we had weed control issues last year because of how dry it was. And if you remember back to that growing season, right, we started off dry. We'd had a hard time getting any of our frees to have a good rain on them to get them activated and to get the suppression of some of our weeds. So we'd had probably older water hemp, older weeds and what we were expecting. We never got that activated. Then because of low humidity and high temperatures, those weeds harden off. And then as we try to go after them with whatever post-emergence herbicide that we had, we just didn't have the efficacy that we were hoping for. And like you said, environment plays a big role. And I had one sales rep that was on the crop protection side say to me last year, Dean, we've got to quit using environment as an excuse. Well, I get that, but it's kind of like, you know, your corn hivers, it's genetics by environment, right? That's kind of the same way with herbicides. It's the herbicide and then the environment that we're dealing with that all played together and do we have good weed control? And our environment last year acted more like Western Kansas, Western Nebraska than it did like Iowa or Minnesota or that sort of thing. So where we probably should have upped our adjuvant game a little bit, used a more aggressive adjuvant last year, we didn't, we kind of got skittish, we got high temperatures, well, I don't want to burn my corn. We stayed with either a non-ionic or what have you. And we probably should have been using something more aggressive like crop oil or aggressive type adjuvant to help break those cuticles, get a better control. And so where that was last year, you fast forward into this year. And because we remember last year, we remember the weed control issues that we had, our tendency would be to, well, I remember that I struggled last year. I want to change my adjuvant to where I'm going to use more aggressive adjuvant now because of the situation I had last year. Well, that could be totally the wrong thing to do given that we've had a lot of moisture. We have succulent plants, succulent weeds, succulent corn crop out there. It's going to, if you use an aggressive adjuvant like a crop oil or MSO in some cases, you may see more crop phytotoxicity than you were hoping for. Because our environment has changed, right? We're not in this drought kind of situation we were last year. We're now in a more succulent type growing condition. So my biggest thing to growers were when they're reading their label and they're making their adjuvant choices, I would stick with the adjuvants that are listed on that label. I wouldn't probably go to the most aggressive one because it usually goes non-ionic is probably the least aggressive crop oil is a little bit more and MSO is the most aggressive kind of adjuvants. So probably not doing the most aggressive, I'm probably sticking in that medium to lower type category because of where my weeds are, where the crop is and that sort of thing. I'm going to go with that probably less aggressive adjuvant because I just don't need that extra you know, cuticle burn or whatever to get that herbicide penetrated into the leaf because of my growing conditions, if that makes sense. So we got totally different, four opposite years, dry year last year, pretty good year this year with the crop moisture, if you did get a free on, it probably got activated, we have plenty of activating rain, you're getting that suppression of your weeds. And so that's a good thing. So we have less weeds to deal with, probably smaller weeds to deal with. And that's going to help out with our control overall as we go forward. Perfect. You touched on, you know, the freeze are working. That's given a grower was able to get that free on, right? So this year has been challenging in many areas. And then some growers just frankly were not able to get that on. They were very focused on trying to get some crop in the ground and we're not able to get over all of the acres. So what adjustments should a grower make if they didn't get that free on and, you know, what kind of changes should they make with their post application here? Yeah, it's really going to boil down to sitting together with your agronomist or whoever's making your herbicide recommendations and looking at what your plan was, right? So if my plan was I had a good pre start off and I was going to come back with a post herbicide pass, maybe with, maybe without residual, I may have to change that up a little bit, right? Because if I didn't get a pre on and I'm using a post product that doesn't have any residual, well, you're basically going to take care of what weeds might be out there, but you're not going to have anything to prevent another flush of weeds. And we really, we need something that's going to be in the soil to prevent another flush of weeds and then we kill whatever is there right now. So we need to get to crop canopy, right? Crop canopy helps us out a lot in reducing weed emergence and that sort of thing. And so we need to get to crop canopy, we need to get the residual on. So I might do something with my post pass to beef up the residual to get me to that longevity that I need to keep my field clean till we get through crop canopy. With that comes a little bit of a caveat though, right? Our total AI loads are going up. And given our weather conditions, we may again induce a little more phyto with that. We need an actively growing plant. The more actively growing that plant is, it can metabolize whatever herbicide that we put at it. But if we get cool, wet weather and we get a high AI load with an aggressive adjuvant, we can see more phyto toxicity. So there's trade-offs here with each decision that we make. We may get more longevity for residual. We may have to deal with a little more phyto. We may have no phyto, but we have no residual, right? So there's trade-offs for every decision we make. And it's just basically trying to make the best decision for that grower on that anchor. Yeah, and when it comes to, you know, timing of that post-application, I would imagine probably the best recommendation is not by the calendar or by what that crop stage is from the corn standpoint. We need to be on label with weed size more than anything. So when we see those weeds coming in, you know, four-inch weeds is really four-inch weeds and making sure that we're getting them before they get any size to them to have real effective control. And that's a big thing there. You hit the nail right on the head. And especially with the driver weeds, like we talk about waterhemp, even Palmer amaranth, we don't deal with that as much as still pigweed species. Waterhemp and Palmer amaranth, they really get going when our temperature gets above 86 degrees. Again, we think back to last year and the environment that we were going with. Our temperatures increased pretty decently. We get that weed that's now, instead of two inches, it's four inches, six inches tall. At a waterhemp, when it gets into those corn taps out at 86, waterhemp Palmer get going at 86. They can metabolize more herbicide, the bigger they are and the warmer it is. They can metabolize that really fast. So how do we get by that? We go after smaller weeds and we go after them with a robust AI. And so that's how we can tackle this. The worst thing for us to do is get a warm temperature and we have big weeds that we're trying to go trophy hunt with our herbicide. I get it. Growers like to see weeds die because they feel like they're getting the most out of the herbicide choice when that happens. I totally get that. I'd rather have the call that says, Dean, why am I even out here? I don't see any weeds. I feel like I'm wasting my money on this soil residual. Well, no, you're not. It's going to help you out, keep that field clean, and make sure that we're not trying to deal with weeds that we miss. If I'm going to miss, I would rather miss early than miss late. Because when we miss late, we have very few options. I don't know of anybody that likes to run crops or herbicide options. When we miss late, are very few and far between, and it's a bad deal for everybody. So if you're going to miss, miss early, and usually, I ask this question to a bunch of our crop protection reps, I go, have you ever had a respray when growers went too early? Most of the time, it was no. The odds of there being a problem going earlier, a lot less than the other way around. Perfect. These are great recommendations. We know every year is different, and just like every other management piece in what we do with corn and soybeans, this herbicide thing should be the same thing, that we should adjust if you have Plan A, and we might have to adjust Plan B or Plan C. And I think that's the way out with some of these guys. So, appreciate the time today, Dean, and the great insights from the crop protection side here. So, with that, I think we'll go ahead and wrap up our Beyond the Seeds series here with the We're All Ears podcast. And thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time.

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• May 24, 2024

  E022: Focus Friday: Scouting Soybeans and Corn Emergence and Vigor

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Charles Scovill, gives an update on what he is seeing in the field this week in Michigan. He also invited Karl Bobholz, Corn Technical Product Lead, to the podcast to discuss corn emergence and vigor. Listen in to this Focus Friday for an update from Charles!

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  11 min

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist with your Focus Friday here on May the 24th. This week, we're going to give you a quick update on crop progress across Michigan. Gonna talk a little bit about some of the service calls I've been making in the field this week, primarily around soybean replant. And I have another special guest with us today. It's our corn technical product lead for the Northern US. And real excited about some of the things that he's been seeing, a little wider perspective than just what we see here in Michigan. Let's jump right into the crop progress. It certainly as a whole, it's been a little bit variable, but at the whole, it's also very good. It's fun when I can drive down the road and row the crops. And I always get nervous on this though, because sometimes we tend to do a lot of our crop scouting simply from the roadside. And that never ends up well when we go to harvest at the end of the year. But we'll talk a little bit about that as well. Within that, jumping into our growing degree day units so far, that early crop that we had planted and looking at the GHX app, we've actually accumulated 443 heat units, which puts us at the V3 growth stage. Now, quick agronomic tip of the week here is let's talk a little bit about how we stage those crops. So we're talking about corn. We went from VE, which is emergence, to V1, V2 and V3. And those numbers, V1, V2 and V3, are related to the collar on that corn plant. So we can't just count leaves. We have to wait until that leaf comes out and it kind of grows long enough that it folds over. And when you look at that stem where that leaf is attached, you actually will start to see that collar once that leaf folds over. And only then can you count it as a growth stage, V1, V2, V3. So our V3 corn today would have three leaves that all are long enough to grow out and grow back down a little bit and have that collar develop there. Now soybeans, of course, are a little different. We have VE, that emergence, but then we have a VC. That C is for Cotyledons. But then after the Cotyledons, we develop a true leaf. And we don't count V1 until we actually have the first unrolled trifoliate leaf, which is the next leaf after the true leaves. So be watching for those and work on correctly growth staging those crops. It certainly helps as we think about the development over time. Service call-wise, never the greatest part of my job, but at the same time, it's fun to be able to help farmers make decisions that are going to be hopefully the greatest return on investment for, in some cases, just a bad situation. So I have been doing some scouting in the field, getting out of the truck, and that's truly the only way we can do that. And with soybeans, if we're drilled out there, we're throwing that hula hoop, we're looking for the number of plants. Now I've got a 36-inch hula hoop that I throw. And if I take each of the plants in that hoop and multiply it by just over 6,000, technically 6,165, that gives me an idea. So short-term, if I've got only 10 plants in that hoop, guess what? I've got just over 60,000 plants per acre. And if I'm thinking soybean replant this time of the year, I want relatively evenly spaced 80,000 or more plants per acre out there. And so we throw that hoop multiple times in random spots and see what we're at and make those counts and then make those decisions. The good news on soybeans replant, at least we can go in there and thicken up that stand and be very effective with that, maybe hit it on a 20% angle from what our original planting was. We're not driving down the rows, but we can do that. And most of the reasons we've been doing replant have been early planted into a little bit wetter than ideal soils. We've got a crust out there and they're just not making it through the crust. Now, the longer they sit in that ground, of course, we're seeing more feeding. And I saw a lot of slug damage earlier this week and eating on those plants. Also seeing some seed corn maggots also doing their damage. So get out there, throw your hoop, do your evaluations. If you're in rows, then we're just counting plants in a row like we would for corn. Speaking of corn, though, if we do have to replant corn, and I haven't had any yet, but understand we've got to tear up that stand completely and start fresh on corn. Just a whole different situation than soybean. So give me a call if you do have any issues there, and we're happy to get you taken care of. Finally today, we have Karl Bobholz. He is our corn technical product lead for Syngenta here. Covers a great portion of the northern US., including Michigan. And Karl, I just want to thank you for agreeing to be a part of the podcast this week. Really looking forward to some of your insights from across the northern US. Hey, thank you, Charles. It's always good to jump on a call with you. And this podcast would be nothing new, but this would be awesome to have that connection with you. I'll appreciate it. So we've got a couple of questions to go over. And first of all, you know, we know you've traveled from Wisconsin to South Dakota these past few weeks. Just curious, what are you seeing as far as the crop progression across the Northern US right now? Yeah, I've been able to start traveling the last three weeks across, like you said, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin. And like you started off the podcast, you know, there is some V3 corn, but there are some fields not planted. The thing I would say is though, it's just amazing how growers can take small planting windows that we had this year, in some cases, only two days, and we can put a lot of crop in. If you go across the upper Midwest, it's easily 65, 75% planted, and it's looking pretty good. There are some just emerging, but there's a lot at that V2, V3 corn growth stage. So it's been pretty impressive. The one thing I would say though is the last two days, I've been dodging some big storms in Minnesota and South Dakota. When you get to the plots after the storms, you have to wait a little bit to let the water run through the field. But in most cases, the drain tiles are keeping up in Minnesota and South Dakota, but you do see some standing water here and there, especially in some of those rolly areas that you might see in the Western Plains. Great, it's always nice when our Western counterparts are getting the crop in as well. Second question is, I know a big part of your job is to evaluate our newest corn hybrids for coal germination tolerance. Just curious what you're seeing on these products this year. And another good question there. One good thing is we've been able to look at plots that are really designated to be planted early. We have roughly about 12 to 15 locations that we try to plant a week to 10 days ahead of typical grower plantings. And this allows us to really double check how our laboratory results are comparing to field results. And this year, we were able to get all of our new products into those testing environments and testing protocols. And I would say that 100 day, the 101 day, 103 day, they're looking stellar coming to ground, like a picket fence, very nice dark green color and very uniform coming to ground. So I'm excited that emergence is the first critical step in the only to get good results in the fall. And I'm really excited about this new class of products coming up. We've done a lot of work to ensure that we have good germinations in our parent lines. This year's class is going to take it up another notch. And I'm really excited about that as we move forward. Well, Karl, I'm glad to hear that because certainly when you do your job well, it makes my job a lot easier and a lot less service calls out there. So keep picking us the good ones out there. Our final question today is, I know that you spend a lot of time reading both emergence and vigor as kind of two separate categories on our corn hybrids. And I know our listeners can look in a catalog and look at those numbers, but can you help my listeners better understand the true difference between emergence and vigor and why it really should matter to us? Yeah, so emergence ratings is really taken at that V1 to V3. And really what we're seeing is how uniform is that emergence of that product coming out of the ground. We all heard studies and all heard lectures over the many years saying, hey, you have to have corn emerging within 24 hours of each other, otherwise it becomes a weed, right? And that's why we really work on taking that emergence ratings and really ensuring that our products are having a very uniform emergence so it can have that first step into that very successful season. The second part of your question, Charles, that seedling vigor, that's really what, honestly, when you go 55, 65 miles an hour down the road, that's what everyone thinks that you're looking at. But really what that is, is really between that V3 and V5. So how is that product growing right before the ear set happens at the V5 growth stage? That is when the ear development starts within the corn plant. And that V3 to V5, if that product is uniform, growing at a good pace, typically that's saying that that product is healthy and it's going to set a good ear within that plant. So we keep those two separate. A lot of times, we all think we want to merge them together, that emergence and seedling vigor are the same, but really it's two different things, but they really both lead to good yield results in the fall. And both ratings are critical for our products and for the growers, good results in the fall. Well, Karl, I appreciate you kind of clarifying that. At the end of the day, I know that it's a true asset to have you on our team and somebody that's out there walking these products across multiple environments, because we can only see them in one environment each year here in Michigan typically, and it brings us better products every time. So Karl, thank you again for joining us here. And folks, this will wrap up this week's Focus. Friday, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist. Have a great week.

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• May 21, 2024

  E021: Beyond the Seed: Nitrogen Management Considerations

  Join Golden Harvest Agronomist, Adam Mayer, LIVE from the tractor cab to hear him give an update from the field and discuss nitrogen management considerations for our current field conditions.

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  11 min

  Additional Resources

  • Golden Harvest Agronomy
  • Managing Nitrogen Use Efficiency

  Episode Transcript

  I'm Adam Mayer, Golden Harvest Agronomist from Northeast Iowa and Southern Minnesota. Here with another episode of Beyond the Seed for the We're All Ears podcast. Today, I'm coming to you live from the tractor seat, and I'm going to give you some updates on what's going on around the territory to start with. And also want to talk a little bit on some nitrogen management considerations with things definitely changing on the moisture front to give us a little bit more things to think about when it comes to nitrogen management for this season. Let's look at the current conditions out there. Look at GDUs tracked from April 22nd. Landing date, we'll say that puts us about 250 GDUs, which would be in that B1 to B2 stage of corn development. But as many of you know, not every plant in the field is at that same stage because there may have been some issues with emergence and development overall with soil types and other conditions playing into what we're seeing for stands, as well as different stages of corn out there. So I've had a bunch of replants or potential replants with reduced stands in areas at this point here around the May 20th timeframe. Stands will have to be below about 22, 23,000 stand before it would warrant replanting at this juncture. And it does look like it's probably going to be some moisture coming here for the next week. That might limit any activities on that front as well. I've also seen that there are no real perfect stands out there, regardless of planting date. There's going to be some spots in the field that are great, but once again, with the moisture we had this spring, there were quite a few instances where soil types, topography, et cetera, were played into how perfect that stand is. There have been, like I've talked already, many more instances with insects showing up at some seed corn maggots doing some severe damage, as well as the same kind of thing happening on soybeans. So seed corn maggot, although it says in its name, corn, is not specific to corn. And you can see some damage happening on those cotyledons, hypocotyls and early stages of a soybean life as well. So once again, that's why we're doing that suck side piece on the soybeans to help keep those issues at bay, if we can. Then back to some of the things that we're seeing in corn. We're going to see some rapid development here in the next couple of weeks. And I've already seen a few cases where that first set of nodal roots is just starting to develop. And we know how important those nodal roots are as that plant will switch from solely being reliant on the seed for nutrients to getting that water and nutrient from the root system that that nodal root is going to provide. So we'll be watching out on that development here in the coming weeks and make sure there's a nice transition from the seminal roots to those nodal roots. With that, we would love to have proper nutrients near that root zone so it can take advantage as soon as possible. Back to the topic at hand around nitrogen management and loss mechanisms. Let's look at the three loss mechanisms for nitrogen. Nitrogen, those being de-nitrification, which is the loss, the nitrogen N2 gas up into the atmosphere with bonded, saturated situations created that requirement, anaerobic requirements. Then we have leaching, which is where we could lose that NO3 minus nitrogen, nitrate version. Mostly through your soil water, and that's going to be excess soil water down into the timelines, through the profile. The other loss mechanism is volatilization, which happens a lot of times with urea type products, which volatilizes and goes up as a gas. Both denitrification and leaching are lost pathways that utilize excess moisture. You need some potting for that denitrification to take place. Obviously, we have had a lot of that in the last couple of years, but that might be prevalent in some areas of geographies this year. And the other lost mechanism that I think is going to be a potential consideration for most would be around the leaching aspect. And it's going to depend on what form of nitrogen you were using. You know, that anhydrous ammonia, when that's applied, it does adhere to the soil particles and is in a pretty stable form until it gets converted to nitrate form. That conversion happens. It's a function of soil moisture and temperature, just like a lot of biological transformations. So the warmer and optimal moisture will trigger more conversion there. Fortunately, up until mid-May here, we haven't had a large amount of conversion that I would be concerned that I lost half of my nitrogen or something like that. We may have lost a lower percentage of our anhydrous through that leaching process, but it is likely not to be a large amount. Oh, watch out for that rock. Somebody should pick up those rocks out here. We have a couple of potential loss mechanisms there in that it is in multiple forms from nitrates to some urea, and we could see some volatilization as well as leaching potential with that particular product. So if we had done all of our nitrogen up front, let's say a liquid program, that loss potential is fairly high if we have significant rain events and saturated soil conditions. I really want to emphasize that the last couple of years, nitrogen losses have been very low with lower rainfall or saturated conditions, and that residual nitrogen and sulfur was actually there from the following year that we were able to utilize in a lot of cases, as well as soil mineralization itself was good enough to sustain or help with that crop, especially late season. We really didn't see much for nitrogen issues the last couple of years, and this year might be different. So we might need to do some adjustments to our management plan to ensure that we have adequate amounts of nitrogen and sulfur to match what our yield potential and goals are for those individual fields. Just a few comments around that management plan for timing the source. So we've done a few more things where you guys can get a lot done with a white drop. We also still have availability of Coltrane machine side dress rig. I just want to say I wouldn't try to get too cute with timing and push it back too far, because we still do need to allow that nitrogen source to get to the root profile and actually be utilized. So we know that we need a very large amount of nitrogen from that P8 to tassel timeframe. That's where about half our nitrogen is going to be taken up and utilized. So that's a pretty good chunk. We want to make sure we have availability there. I understand we need to have some for later season there, but we'll also have some mineralization occurring later in the season that we utilize if we have nitrogen in place at the right times there. So a lot of times I grab the air on the early side for in-season management versus the later side to make sure we don't miss that opportunity for a window there. We want to have that nitrogen where it's supposed to be when that plant feeds it. In summary, let's make sure we're evaluating those plant stands on both corn and soybeans. Make sure we have adequate stands there and have some issues. The 55-mile-an-hour view might not show you the whole story on what's going on on the backside of that field. So make sure we're doing thorough scouting there. And then adjust our management plans accordingly with what population we have there and yield potential along with what we're having for moisture conditions and potential for nitrogen loss. If you have any more questions around these topics, make sure you reach out to your Golden Harvest Seed Advisor, sales rep, specialist, or local agronomist, myself, Adam Mayer. So signing off, throwing the tractor seat this week on Beyond the Seed podcast. Thanks for joining. Thank you.

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• May 20, 2024

  E020: Kernels of Agronomy: Switching Corn Hybrid RM Decisions

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Wayde Looker, discusses switching corn hybrid relative maturity as planting gets later into the season. He talks about factors that go into this decision. Reach out to your local Golden Harvest representative or agronomist with questions around planting dates and switching corn hybrids.

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  06 min

  Additional Resources

  • Early Maturity In Corn Hybirds
  • Corn Hybirds Planting Dates

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• May 17, 2024

  E019: Focus Friday: Changing Corn Hybrid RM, Pests and Nitrogen Discussions

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Charles Scovill, fields some questions he has been getting around switching corn hybrid relative maturity and early season pests. He is joined on this episode by Andy Heggenstaller, Head of Agronomy, to talk about nitrogen application.

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  16 min

  Additional Resources

  • Early Maturity In Corn Hybirds
  • Seedcorn Maggot
  • Nitrogen And Sulfur Sidedress Applications Response In Corn

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist with your Focus Friday here on the 17th of May. Couple things we want to cover today. First of all, a quick area update. Second, want to talk about the question I'm getting about, is it time to consider switching to earlier hybrids? If we haven't got it planted yet. Third, I've got a pest update. We're seeing some things out there. And finally, got a special guest to take a minute to look at nitrogen, and how we need to be thinking about that this time of the year. So getting started right away here. First of all, if we go back to that early planted corn we've been talking about each week, the good news is that is real close to pushing V1. And I'll be honest with you, driving around the countryside, I'm seeing a lot of corn planted, a lot of soybeans planted, and I'm seeing a fair amount of crops starting to emerge out of the ground. So that's encouraging for those guys that have been able to find some dry ground to get on and get that crop in. I sure think we're better off than a lot of our friends in Indiana and Ohio right now. So that's good news. As far as the question on switching to earlier hybrids, we're sitting here the 17th of May, and that's not horrible. I'll be honest with you, I did the math and that March 1st corn took 67 days to accumulate 120 heat units or enough to emerge. Now, if we forecast what's out here in the next 10 days between now and the 27th of May, we're going to also accumulate another 120 heat units. So 10 days this time of the year is pretty easy to get corn emerge. So I just really struggle with the idea of switching. Now granted, if we're sitting there with 114 day corn in mid-Michigan, yeah, we're probably thinking of something a little bit earlier. But if we're planting our normal maturing hybrids this time of the year, there's actually been a pile of research done by the universities to say that one, it just takes less time to emerge. And we know that by the heat units that we're getting now versus a month ago. But at the same time, corn actually finds that it requires less total heat units in order to hit maturity. And we plan a little later. And so we've got a great plan in place. We've got the right hybrids on the right soils in the right situation. And so keeping that in place, my thought is always, you know, Memorial Day, yeah, then we can start thinking about some switching the end of month here. But prior to that, we're just oftentimes in the risk of losing more than we're gaining by changing up those hybrids to earlier maturities. And so if you want to talk more about it, give me a call. We'll be happy to do so. Want to spend a minute also on pest update. So seed corn maggots have been showing up across the Midwest. I got first reports in Wisconsin. And then this week, I got reports from Michigan on some of those earlier planted soybeans where we're seeing seed corn maggots. Now, we're scouting those and we need to be scouting those early fields right now. You're going to look for feeding on the cotyledons. And if we feed through that growing point, that plant's going to die. And then of course we go back to the look of how many plants break we've got out there, either measuring the rows or throwing the hula hoop. And at the same time, if we don't have enough loss, it's probably worth leaving that stand out there. And we can work through that individually if we need to. But at the same time, the good news is those seed porn maggots have pretty much worked through their life cycle. And if we do have to replant, we should be safe. Also getting reports of black cut worm flying in from the south on these storm fronts. They're looking for those fields that are green. So cover crops, heavy winter annuals, those things where they're going to lay their eggs. And of course we're going to clean up those fields, plant them, and when they hatch, the only thing that's left for them to eat on is our crop. So we want to keep a good chance of scouting those fields that we knew were green early on for some potential black cut worm damage this year. So lots of great things going on. I want to jump into a special guest I have with us. I have invited Andy Heggenstaller, who's the head of agronomy here for Golden Harvest. When I think of nitrogen, I think of Andy Heggenstaller. He is just a tremendous expert on the topic. And so sometimes that can be a little confusing. Want to get him on here and welcome him to the show. Welcome, Andy, how are you? Good, Charles. Happy Friday. Nice to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Absolutely. We'll jump right into a couple of questions. The first one is, from your perspective, what are the challenges that are just inherent in corn nitrogen supply when it's related to things like crop by soil, by weather dynamics out there? I think that's the perfect place to start. Oftentimes, I think, as you go into this, you assume that everybody knows this, and I think most of us do, but it's really important in terms to get to so what from a management perspective to appreciate how different nitrogen is from our other macronutrients that we think about in corn. The way I like to think about it is P and K, they're like a bank account. You put it in for the most part, and then what comes out is what you harvest off of the crop. There's some complexities, but by and large, that's how it works. Nitrogen doesn't work that way. We put it in, whether it's fertilizer or manure or other organic sources, and we do take it off with the crop. But at the meanwhile, there is a pool of organic nitrogen, so the soil organic matter that contains thousands. If you had, for example, a 2% to 3% organic matter soil, there are several thousand pounds per acre of nitrogen potentially there. And the question is based on temperature, moisture, soil texture, management practices, how much of that organic nitrogen that becomes available each year is highly variable. At the same time, how much nitrogen we lose from the soil is highly variable too. Our P and K are attached to the cation exchange capacity in the soil, and in most cases, they're not going to go anywhere where nitrogen is negatively charged, therefore it does not adhere to the soil. And if we get a lot of moisture moving down through the soil, or we get ponding and anaerobic conditions, we can lose that nitrogen. So if fertility is a bank account, P and K is like make a deposit, make a withdraw. In the case of nitrogen, you can make your deposits and your withdraws, but depending on your soil management and weather, there might be a robber coming in and taking some of it, or there might be an angel investor that you don't know about that's coming and making deposits. So it just gets much more complicated than those nutrients. And we need to think about the supply dynamics differently. Yep, so true. And I think that's why I really wanted to join you now, because this is just so much more complex than the PNK side of the world. You know, when we think about nitrogen timing and possibly split application, you know, what's been your experience or the research you've seen on the ROI, return on investment there for nitrogen timing and split application? Yeah, so like everything in our profession, Charles, you know, we always start, we get picked on a lot for this as agronomists, right? It depends. And so it does. But let's talk about what does it depend on? I would say in general, I am a strong supporter of split applications of nitrogen. And I'll tell you why in a second. But as we think about my experiences, both with trials that I've managed or farmers I've worked with or research that I'm familiar with, to be completely honest, the bulk of my experience in the literature would say, just generally speaking, split applications of nitrogen are more about risk mitigation than they are pushing a new top-end yield with corn. There are obviously exceptions. But if we look at it in general, I'm aware of a very, the most thorough study that's ever been done in the Midwest to my knowledge. It just so happens that study was done in some average to drier years, which is important to note, found that about three quarters of the time a split application of nitrogen was similar to a spring application of nitrogen at the same rate, whereas about 25% of the time it yielded more. Had those studies been done in really wet years, I expect that the results would look different. And that's why I go back and say, I think about it as a risk management perspective. There are going to be years. Let's think about at least where I live in Northern Illinois, we had very, not like drought, but we had very dry or low, not heavy rainfall moisture conditions during May and June. What happens with temperature and moisture in May and June is absolutely determines what happens with nitrogen. When we have conditions between about right now, now that the soil is warm, we've got mineralization gone, we got mid 50-degree soil temperatures. If we are average to below average in moisture between now and the 4th of July, split applications of nitrogen all else equal aren't going to give us a tremendous amount of benefit over a spring application. But if between now and the 4th of July, we continue, which we will, to have warm soil temperatures, but we get heavy rainfall, especially when we get those really heavy rainfalls and long periods of soil saturation, then the split application is going to pay. So that's, again, I go back, think about it of managing my risk. In any given year, the benefit of it will vary, but over the long term, we both know that we're going to encounter those years between mid-May and the 4th of July that are really wet. And in those years, that split application, OLS equal, will benefit us. I also, last point I'll make on that is just important to think about that about 10% of all the nitrogen that corn will take up will be taken up between the time it emerges and we get to V6. So, we're in the midpoint or early point of that right now. We're talking about 10%, you know, for 200-bushel corn, we're talking about 15 pounds of nitrogen or so is all it is, maybe 20 pounds. And then between V6 and R1, 50 to 60%, 100 to 120 some pounds of nitrogen will be taken up during that period, mid vegetative, early vegetative through reproductive. And then the other, what would that be? 30, 35% will get taken up after R1. And so that's the logic of the side dress idea, right? Sometime between V6 and R1, let's put nitrogen into the system when we know the demand is the highest. But again, I like to think of it as risk mitigation and how beneficial it is to me will depend on the year and what the rainfall patterns look like in the early summer. Well, that's great advice. And we certainly get those years where we see that happen and rain that we don't expect, losing some of that nitrogen out there. So speaking of nitrogen, boy, the most common thing we hear anytime we hear the word nitrogen is everybody follows that up with the word sulfur. And so I guess I'm curious on your perspective on that sulfur nitrogen relationship and what we need to be doing with sulfur and nitrogen together. Right, no, I agree. Those two go hand in hand. It feels like since maybe mid 2000s, this issue had become much more forefront, especially since 2010. And of course we know, and your listeners, many of them will know, that's due to changes in air quality standards that have reduced, you know, from an environmental beneficial standpoint, the amount of acid rain and sulfur that's coming down in rainfall. What we know is that, I'll talk about it two different ways. They're both right. They're not mutually exclusive. Is that generally that 200 plus bushel corn crop that we're thinking about, it's going to take somewhere in that 25 to 40 pounds of sulfur, but like nitrogen, sulfur can be supplied from the soil. In fact, if we think about all the major micro, or excuse me, macro and secondary nutrients that our crop's going to take up, sulfur is the most similar to nitrogen and how it behaves in the soil and how the plant metabolizes it. And so that's oftentimes why we think of them together. So the first way I would think about it is, we're looking to somewhere in that 30 pounds of sulfur as a good number. That'll vary depending on your soil organic matter. And some of those same situations I just managed with nitrogen. If you have high organic matter, it's warm and it's moist, but it's not saturated, you would need less sulfur from fertilizer because the soil would end up having a net positive contribution. On the other hand, if it was heavy rainfall and we lose a lot of sulfur this time of year and or we have low organic matter soils, we'll need to apply more sulfur. I think where I see the best managers moving is when I apply nitrogen, I'm going to apply sulfur. So I think if you're going to apply nitrogen twice, apply sulfur twice. If you're going to put urea down upfront, put some AMS or something like that with it. If you're going to use 28 or 32% liquid for a V6 to VT side dress, why drop what have you, put some ammonia thiosulfate with that. I think the ratio, if we want to think about it in a total amount again, I think somewhere in that 30 pounds, different people will tell you differently and they'll tell you differently based on the soils they're dealing with. But the other way to think about it is for every six to 10 pounds of nitrogen, put a pound of sulfur. As we get into those lighter textured soils, let's air toward more like that one pound of sulfur for every six pounds of nitrogen. As we get into higher organic matter soils or situations where we have not historically seen issues with sulfur, let's get closer to one pound of sulfur for every 10 pounds of nitrogen. But absolutely, I think it's a key part and sulfur and nitrogen should be thought of as one or together when we're thinking about corn fertility. Excellent advice. I always think of it like potatoes and gravy. If I'm going to have potatoes, I want some gravy along with it. So, hey, as we wrap up things here today, I'd like to think about what's actionable right now. So, in your estimation, what really matters most this week about nitrogen in your mind? So specifically, that would depend on the farmer or manager I was talking to, right? And I spent enough time Charles with you in Michigan and thanks for all the time you've spent introducing me to your seed advisors and farmers there. And one of the things I've learned about Michigan compared to some other places like Iowa, Illinois or Minnesota where I've lived is there's a lot of variability and how farmers in Michigan manage their corn, right? We have dairy farmers, we have some extremely sophisticated precision type farmers, and then we have people doing what maybe we would say just kind of more standard management of let's put urea on and plant corn. So what I would say specifically would vary depending on which one of those farmers I was talking to, but here's the central theme that would be in my mind no matter who I was having the conversation with. And I'll just go back to right now, as we look on the 17th of May, our corn crop needs very little nitrogen. We are not at any risk, no matter within reason, what's happening out there today with nitrogen. But as we approach V6, be thinking about however I'm managing, am I set up even just from a simple mass balance approach in terms of what have I applied? What's the yield goal that I've set? Can I supply my soil and my fertility or manure program? Am I set up to be able to supply 100 to 130 pounds of nitrogen between V6 and R1? As I've heard you say before, even if I'm not set up to supply that, most of our soils in Michigan that we're growing corn on are going to find a way to get that done. Maybe they'll come up a little short, but if they don't, then the problem we get into is we need another 60 pounds during R1 to R6, right? And if we don't have it set up that at R1, we're in a good spot, this plant's going to start to cannibalize itself. It's going to start firing. Even if we don't have drier conditions, we're going to have stock quality issues, we're going to reduce yield. So, if we can get this crop to R1, in my experience, in most agricultural soils in the Midwest, we will win the nitrogen game. So, be thinking, where's my next 120 pounds of nitrogen going to come from before flowering? That'd be my general advice. Well, Andy, excellent advice as always. And again, appreciate your perspective on nitrogen as we think about certainly growing this year, again, the best crop possible. So as we wrap up here today, just want to thank everybody for joining us. And again, this is Charles Scovill. Your Golden Harvest Agronomist with your Focus Friday. Have a great week.

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• May 14, 2024

  E018: Cultivating Success: Wet Spring Impact on Planting and Crop Emergence

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Andrew Rupe, discusses saturated soils and the impact on planting and crop emergence. Wet springs can mean things like delayed planting, but can also mean an increased potential for seedling diseases for crops that are in the ground.

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  12 min

  Additional Resources

  • Golden Harvest Agronomy
  • Corn And Soyben Seedling Diseases

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, folks, thanks for tuning in to the We're All Ears podcast. My name is Andrew Rupe, your Golden Harvest Agronomist covering East Central Iowa. And it has been a difficult couple of weeks in East Central Iowa, difficult time to get some crop planted as some guys are trying to finish up. It's been about two weeks since we've had really some significant progress in my geography as far as planting progress. Fortunately, the rainy wet weather has made its way back and we've experienced this to maybe a little bit more of an excessive degree than we were really actually hoping for. So a few of the rainfall totals just since April 25th, Ames area has received around five and a half inches of rainfall on average based on the National Weather Service. As we move up to the northern part of my area, we get to Waterloo and we're closer to actually about 6.7 inches in the last two weeks for that Waterloo area. And then if we circle down to Linn County and Cedar Rapids, a little bit less. We've actually had a little bit of a nicer window there, closer to actually about 2.8 inches around the Cedar Rapids area. So as we move over to the eastern part of my geography, we've actually been able to maybe sneak in a day or an afternoon of planting in that Cedar Rapids and east area. Not a lot of progress, not a lot of long days and multiple days strung together planting, but a little bit here and there to get an 80 acre field done or something like that. My best estimation on percent planted in the area, probably somewhere around 60% on corn. And I'd say about the same on soybeans, you know, we've had some guys that were a little bit gun shy on planting corn because of those colder temperatures and they stuck with soybeans. And then we've had some of this moisture that's came through and they felt a little bit better about planting beans instead of corn into some of the wetter conditions. But again, it's been very, very sporadic. I know neighbors that one guy is nearly 100% complete on his planting progress. Whereas the other neighbor hasn't even started yet. So again, very sporadic for his planting progress. Just has been a little bit difficult of a window, especially recently to get anything strung together. So a little bit on some of the positives of this wet weather. Going into the spring, a lot of people were really concerned with how dry our soils were. You know, should we be going corn on corn? Or what should we be doing to help conserve some of this moisture? Because quite frankly, our soil profile was not at 100% recharge. We were pretty lacking as far as soil moisture. So I think that's been nice for guys to see is that, you know, hey, our soil profile is recharged, with high lines are running. And you know, that's definitely a benefit heading into the growing season for us. Some other things that, you know, we struggled with the last couple of years, because it's been so dry, is that pre-emerge herbicide activation this year should be a heck of a lot better. The last couple of years, we've had dry springs and we put down some pre-emerge herbicides. And unfortunately, we just haven't had great activation on those herbicides because we haven't had the moisture to activate them. Well, fortunately this year, if you were able to get your pre-emerge herbicide out there and put down, we've got pretty good moisture to get some activation that should help with some of those, especially some of the small seed of broad leaves, water hemp, things like that, that have been kind of a struggle to help control the last couple of years. Another positive with this moisture is that some of those saltier fertilizers that maybe we've used, especially those in-furrow fertilizers, like a 10-34-0, we've got a little bit more dilution because of this moisture. And we have less of a risk of seeing seedling burn, reduced germination, things like that, because we've got moisture to help kind of reduce that salt content just a little bit, and we won't see as many issues heading into crop emergence. Now, that was some of the positive from this moisture, but what are some of the concerns and what are some of the risks? Well, there's two ways of looking at it. One, if we planted a crop and then we've had moisture or excessive moisture on it, and then also if we simply haven't got the crop in the ground yet. So let's talk about if we've got some crop planted right now, what are some of the things I'm concerned about? Well, number one for me is, if we're sitting in some saturated soils, whether it's corn or beans, saturated soils are generally more of a harbor and a conduit for pathogens to get into our plant. So especially on corn, I'm thinking of crown rot infection. A lot of times that infection takes place early in the season whenever a crop is just germinating or just starting to poke out of the ground, we can get crown rot infection on our corn plant early in the season. How do we manage that? Well, hopefully you've picked a hybrid that has a strong crown rot resistance to it, an in-hose plant resistance to it. Hopefully you've got some genetic tolerance to that infection. Some other things that are effective against it, there's sometimes some in-furrow fungicide, so maybe you use that whenever you plant in the crop that can help protect against some of those crown rot infections. Now on soybeans, there's a disease that we're all too familiar with in eastern Iowa that can take place whenever we've got wet, moist conditions early in the season, and that is sudden death syndrome. It's been a few years since we've seen a real, real aggressive SDS infection take place. We've done some remarkable improvements on the genetic side, but also on the seed treatment side that's really protected our soybeans against this disease. But there is always a concern whenever we run into conditions like this that we could get SDS infection in our soybean plant early in the season. So if we don't have a crop planted, there are a few risks as well for whenever we get back out there. And obviously, one of the biggest things that we're worried about is compaction. That could be sidewall compaction or also tillage compaction just below the surface. So sidewall compaction, you know, obviously we really want to make sure the ground is fit before we get back out there. I know everyone's going to be anxious to get back out there and plant some corn, but we've really got to make sure the ground is fit. So and then some other things that you might look at doing is maybe lightening up the down pressure on your planter, on those row units just a little bit, especially if it's just a little bit marginal when you're getting back out there. So that we're not putting so much weight on that the furrow opening system of the planter. And then we get some slabbing of the sidewalls. One thing I would watch is as you're getting back out there, are you trying to increase the tension pressure on your closing system to close that furrow up? If you are, it might be too wet. And you may not want to be out there planting corn right now. That's one thing that's kind of a good indication of is it a little bit too wet out there to be even planting? Because even if you do increase the tension pressure on your closing system, well, a lot of times that closing system still has a difficult time caving in even the actual sidewalls. It may close the top of the furrow, but it may not quite be caving in all the facets of that sidewall. One thing to maybe think about is talking to your equipment dealer and maybe trying out a different closing system on a row or two on your planter. You know, while you've got this wet window where maybe you can put on two rows and see if you see a difference in how well you can close the furrow and also cave in that sidewall of a couple of rows on your planter. All right, so let's talk about the potential for tillage compaction. For some growers, there is a little bit of a desire to go back out there prior to planting and try to open up the ground a little bit and dry it out a little bit more with like a vertical tillage tool or some type of a soil finisher and just open up that ground and try to let a little bit more air movement to dry that out. In my agronomic opinion, that's not a real effective solution to drying out the ground. While it may dry out the ground a little bit, you may be causing more of an issue late in the season by creating a little bit of a tillage pan a couple of inches down on your soil. So if we talk about both sidewall compaction and tillage compaction, you know, one of the things that we're always concerned with is yes, it's wet now, but is it going to be, are we going to have wet weather come August or are we going to run dry? And if we cause any kind of compaction, root restriction, anything that either limits water movement down or root penetration down, then we could really be running into a disaster scenario for some of our crop, especially whenever we think about our corn crop. So those are some of the things that I just want you guys to think about, be cognizant of, so we don't have to live with those sins the rest of the season. One thing, one last note I want to make is since it is wet, and you're probably not thinking about planting maybe in the next day or two, get out there and evaluate how your first planted crop looks coming out of the ground. So if you were able to go out there and actually get some crop planted earlier, go out and see how all the rows across your planter are emerging. See if there's any little differences from row to row that you can help solve and fix for whenever you get back out there. Is there one row that maybe is a little bit shallower than another? Are you seeing some singulation issues or something like that with your planter? Get out there, evaluate across all of the rows of your planter, and see how well your first planted progress looks like. So that you can actually make some of those adjustments for the rest of the season. Alright, well thank you all for tuning in to this week's episode of We're All Ears. We'll catch you next time.

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• May 13, 2024

  E17: Beyond the Seed: Insect Pest Potential with Later Planted Crops

  Catch up with Golden Harvest Agronomist, Adam Mayer, in the field, as he provides an update on things he has been seeing this week and some things to consider as planting could potentially go later into the season than anticipated.

  Play Now

  07 min

  Additional Resources

  • Golden Harvest Agronomy
  • Corn And Soyben Seedling Diseases
  • Soybean Seed Treatments

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, welcome back to the Beyond the Seeds series, part of the We're All Ears podcast. I'm your host, Adam Mayer, Golden Harvest Agronomist, covering Northeast Iowa and Southern Minnesota. Today, I've got a few different topics we're going to touch on. Really going to dive into current status on what's going on in the fields, what we've seen so far for both corn and soybeans to date, as I record this on Friday, May 10th. And then we want to touch on a few questions I've been getting out in the field. So just to recap what's been going on out here, obviously moisture has come back to the picture for all areas really across the corn belt. For our geography, we had some nice rains overall. You know, this has been warranted in a lot of areas, but maybe a little bit more than we wanted in some areas as well. So this may be a little bit of concern from a few angles when we talk something that was planted. Obviously, we had the potential for some pristine or ponding creating a oxygen-limiting environment that will kill seedlings if we're saturated for more than 24, 48 hours there and not giving it a break from that oxygen-limited situation. You know, the good thing about some of these rains though has been we've had a rain event and then we've had a couple of days of reprieve allowing for the surface water to run off as well as a little bit of internal drainage. And then we've got more rain after that. So the majority of fields have been in decent shape yet and haven't been totally saturated. So I would expect, you know, emergence to still be pretty solid in most cases. Along with this, I want to reemphasize what I mentioned last week as well around making sure we're checking those labels if we didn't get something sprayed and we're still wanting to get on with our pre. If we've cracked the soil with corn or soybeans, we got to make sure that we're using a product that allows for a post application as that pre window is not free anymore. So keep that in mind. If I look at GDUs to date from the April 14th planting window, we're at about 165 GDUs. So that puts us well beyond emergence at that V1 stage. And kind of off and running there, most of that is emerged. And then we are starting to see emergence on that next planting window in the 21st through 24th, 25th there, with about 110 GDUs if you're planting on April 23rd. So we know we need 90 to 120. We're right in there. Things were just poking through with that second planting window there. So some nice progress. I have had some questions from some growers that corn that's emerged doesn't have the best color to it yet. It's kind of a pale, yellow, maybe have some brown specks on it as well. Just not the healthiest looking stuff. Remember that probably not a lot going on that you can do to help from a nutrient standpoint. It's really being fed from that seed until we get to the V4 stage when we're based off that nodal root system for nutrient uptake. So there's not a lot you can do at this point. Really, it's been caused by the cooler, wetter environments, cloudy days. We get some sunshine here in the next several days. That stuff's going to really take off and get some nice color to it and start aggressively growing again. The other thing we've seen sticking on the corn side of things, there have been a few insects doing a little bit of damage for us on some of that seedling stage corn with some seed corn maggots out there, wireworms, some other things. So we've talked about this before that it might be a good year for insects, unfortunately, and we're starting to see some of that come through. So be checking out there for some seed corn maggots. Most of the time, we should have good protection with our insecticide package that's on the seed, but it might not always be the case if that stuff's been sitting in the ground for a while. And some of that seed treatment just wears off after a while. So we've got to keep that in mind from a soybean standpoint on emergence. We are just getting there for for most of those planting dates, same windows as as corn, that emergence is starting to happen. Obviously, we've kept that crust to a minimum with softer soils on the top. Actually, things are pretty mellow regardless of rain or not, but that rain has kept that surface pretty soft and easy to penetrate for those emerging soybeans. I have seen some chemical damage with some things that were just sitting with their hypocotyl at the surface for a few days there when we were in a cooler, wetter environment. And you can see some girdling or chlorosis happening at that point there. And it may take some stand for you reduce some stand as that AI really had time to soak in and accumulate in a very vulnerable state for some of those soybeans. So be on the lookout for that. And then if something was emerged, we can see some splashing up of some of that chemical as well. That can cause some different discoloration on the cotyledons and hypocotyl itself. So hopefully, if you had something that's established a stand there, it will recover pretty quickly as we get into a more rapid growth stage here moving forward. Just to provide some color around maybe what we could see for insect pressure this year. In the last few weeks here, there's been bugs prevalent. The other day, I saw a helicopter spraying an alfalfa field and I thought, what the heck are they doing? It's barely even May and we're spraying alfalfa. And apparently, there's a pretty good infestation of alfalfa weevils. And, you know, the only way you get those is with the good overwintering situation. And that's definitely what we've had. So be on the watch out for anything and everything this year from an insect perspective, in my opinion. That should wrap things up for this week on Beyond the Seed. Hopefully, you have a safe finish to the planting season here and we'll catch you next time.

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• May 10, 2024

  E16: Focus Friday: Soybean Management Strategies to Maximize Yield Potential

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Charles Scovill, gives an update for Michigan farmers, emphasizes what he is seeing in fields, and chats with Dalton Goetz. Dalton is a farmer who won the Michigan, late maturity, non-irrigated soybean yield contest in 2023. In this episode, they discuss soybean management strategies to set the crop up to maximize yield potential. Check in weekly for the Michigan agronomy update from Charles!

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  11 min

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist with your Focus Friday here on May the 10th. This week, we're gonna talk a little bit about how that GHX app experiment's been going with that horn quote unquote planted on the 1st of February. We're going to do a quick area update. I've traveled the entire better part of the state this week, let you know what we're seeing out there. And then thirdly, I've got a guest with me who was actually a past winner of the Michigan soybean yield contest. He's going to share some secrets with us here about how to grow those high yielding soybeans. So jumping right in on the GHX app, that field here in mid-Michigan, the app is telling me that we're at a 48 degree soil temperature, but we're going to get up to 58 degrees today. So soil temperature really at this point in time is a non-issue. It's all about those soil moisture conditions. And here we're sitting at 22% soil moisture. Now it looks damper than that on top, but certainly with the subsoil moisture out there, we are drier than normal, normal being that 35% here in mid-Michigan. Not ready to run the planet today though. As far as heat units, 123 heat units. So that means we have emerged corn and it's forecasting, we're going to see a V1 by the 12th of the month here. So by Sunday, pretty exciting. We're starting to grab some heat units there. Going to be a little colder right away, but then we're going to warm up again. As far as the area update, let's jump into the travels this week. So boy, south of 96, for the most part, been a little wetter than north of 96. Southern part of the state continues to get a little more rain, but I will say a few things planted here and there. Very interesting when I saw some corn actually emerged over in the Webberville area, we could row that corn. And over in Caledonia, south of Grand Rapids, was in a field of soybeans that had been in the ground a month, but it was up and I could row those soybeans as well. Now, just an agronomic tip here when we're thinking about the planting depth on that corn and beans, we're measuring the depth for that corn that's emerged. All we have to do is take the length of that mesocotyl, that stem below the ground there, and measure between the length of the mesocotyl, rather, and add three quarters of an inch, and that'll give us our initial planting depth. Soybeans is a little different though. When I was digging soybeans this week to look at planting depth, we want to dig up and look for that little crook or bend in the stem down low near the bottom of that root there, and measure from there up to the soil line, and that'll give us our soybean planting depth. And that was in about two inches, which is truly ideal for that early planted soybeans. Now, the part of the state that's probably in one of the better conditions is up in the thumb. Was out there, we actually planted a corn plot in the thumb this week, and there were planters rolling there. Obviously the sugar beets have been in, some have been frosted off, but for the most part, they're at least moving the right direction. So we'll have a lot of May yet to go, and a lot of planting yet to go. But I think next week, we're going to maybe get a chance to get a few good days in. So jumping into the next section here is to talk to Dalton Goetz. Dalton's down in the southeast part of the state of Michigan. Last year, he was the state winner for the Late Maturity Non-Irrigated Soybean Contest here in Michigan at 81.48 bushels the acre with our Golden Harvest 2722 Extend Flex Bean there. And boy, that's really exciting to have a state winner. And so I've asked Dalton to join us here. How are you doing today? I'm doing good, Charles. Thanks for having me on. It was pretty exciting thing last year to be a winner and looking forward to kind of pushing those yields a little higher and higher as we learn more. Awesome. Well, going to ask you to share a few things with us today as people are thinking about how they're going to increase yields on their own farms. And as we think about this, want to know what is top of mind for you right now prior to planting these fields that are potentially going to be in the soybean growers yield contest this year? Well, what's kind of top mind for me now is just getting those beans off to a good start. I know kind of all the rage is really early planning. Let's get those beans in early. And I think that's a great thing. We got to get them going and get them a good start. But I would almost turn it more as a timely planting because it's not necessarily according to the date, we want to really focus on that soil structure. Get out there when the dirt is right and the first day that dirt's right, your planter should be running. You can't get out there before it because if you get out there before it, your soil is going to be a little damp, you might suffer a little bit of compaction and soil structure needs to be our number one focus. If we have good soil structure, we're going to have good root structure and that good root structure is just going to lead to a good, healthy plant. And that's where our yield works from, is a good, healthy plant. So I would say top of mind needs to be early but timely planting, focusing on your normal agronomic decision making for dry dirt, good soil structure and good planting conditions. Well, I couldn't agree more. It's one of the things I like to preach time in and time out. I think you're spot on there. When we think about mistakes you've made, we all make mistakes, we all learn from those mistakes. But if you think back on your own situation there, anything you want to share with our listeners here today about the mistakes you've made and what you've learned from those? Well, I've definitely made plenty of mistakes. So trying to learn from those mistakes and get plenty of them to choose from. But I would say one of the biggest ones is kind of tailing off our early planting here is planted some in various row spacings in the early planting window. And I personally have preferred to widen up my row spacing a little bit. I've seen some crusting in the early planting, just from the nature of it. We, you know, you get that bean in an early and it sits there a little longer and they have a hard time pushing through if you get some rains and a little bit of hard soil. So I prefer on my early planting to go in that 30 inch row because that way these beans get a nice little body right next to them to push through and they get a little assistance breaking through and you get a, I feel you get a better stand when they have the assistance in that wide row. And if we don't have a good stand, you don't have a good starting point. And we want to really start with an excellent start for these soybeans to really take off. That's great advice there. I see more and more wider rows, and especially when we're looking for that uniform stand and helping get out of the ground. Certainly great advice. I appreciate that. The last question I've got is, if some of my listeners are thinking, hey, I should try to enter this Michigan soybean growers or even the Golden Harvest Goal for the gold yield contest this year for the very first time, what advice would you give somebody that's just thinking about getting into this? My advice would probably be just plan ahead. Really focus on what these soybean yield components are, what actions you can take to help that soybean plant maximize those soybean yield components. And it might not necessarily be going out there and dumping a bunch of fertilizer, spending a lot of money on foliars or anything like that. Just really think about that soybean plant and what actions we as farmers can take to assist it along in creating the pods, creating the beans, creating the bean size, all those factors that work into your soybean yield components. Let's sit down, plan ahead, write it down. While you're sitting there drinking your morning cup of coffee, pondering what you're going to do on the farm, think about what you can do and when to the timing too, of when you can help that soybean along to really maximize those yield components. I can't stress enough the writing it down because us farmers have so much going on. You got all that stuff in your head, but writing it down and keeping it organized can really help you focus on the brass tacks of what you want to do to maximize that soybean yield. Well, excellent advice there. And certainly if we don't write it down, it's hard to make a change for next year and know what worked and what didn't work. And I think creating that yield over years of experiences is a big part of that. So Dalton, I really appreciate you jumping on here with us today and sharing some of your advice as we all look to grow more bushels of yield in our soybeans this next year. So again, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist with your Focus Friday. Have a great week.

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• May 06, 2024

  E15: Beyond the Seed: Considerations Around Late Planted Crops and Relative Maturity

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Adam Mayer, discusses some considerations for situation where you may run into late planting in a field and around relative maturity specifically for your crop.

  Play Now

  11 min

  Additional Resources

  • Corn Hybrids Planting Dates
  • Early Soyben Planting
  • Early Maturity In Corn Hybirds

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, welcome back to the Beyond the Seeds series as part of our We're All Ears podcast. I'm your host, Adam Mayer, Golden Harvest Agronomist for Northeast Iowa and Southeast Minnesota, as well as South Central Minnesota. Today, I'd like to visit on a few things, to start out just the current crop status and what's going on out in the field. Then I would like to get into some considerations if we would happen to get into a late planting season for relative maturity, specifically for corn and soybeans, what to do in that type of situation. To start out, currently soil temperatures are right around 50, 51 degrees today on a rainy Thursday, May 2nd. And recently they've been in the lower 50s and current forecast suggests that we'll stay in that realm. Probably won't crack 60 in the next five to seven days as far as soil temperatures go. When I look at GDUs accumulated to date, I'm around 115 GDUs for my local area. If I'm using April 13th as that beginning date when some crop did start getting in the ground. So this does put us right on the verge of emergence happening with both of these crops and stand establishment will be vitally important to evaluate in the coming days, especially with the increase of precipitation and moisture could cause some issue with emergence, especially if there are areas of ponding or poorly drained soils that could present issues. Disease might be something that we experience this year, especially when you think of those wetter environment diseases like pythium that like school and wet or phytophthora that likes a warmer and wet environment. So keep an eye out for those as we move forward here. Hopefully our seed treatments can keep some of that in check until we get a good establishment with our plants out there. It's probably worth noting that the weather did sneak up on us in some cases where pre-emerge herbicides were not able to be applied when we wanted to. And there may be a case where the crop will be emerged by the time that we are able to get back in to do that first application. If that's the case, we really need to make sure we're reading labels and make sure that those products we're using as far as herbicides go, are able to be applied on an emerged crop and is not a pre-emerge only type of product. So keep that in mind, watch those labels as we move forward here. Now that we are into the first few days of May, growers have time to think and question their plans moving forward. Do they stick with plan A or move to plan B? So I'd like to address a few of those questions here with corn maturities as we start out here. So I first want to take a look at what that longer term weather forecast and outlook might be for the growing season. It's really hard to know or predict for sure. What I can say is that when we look at the El Nino Southern Oscillation in the end, so there is beginning to be a shift from our El Nino, which we've been in for a little while now, and a very strong El Nino back to a neutral. So there's about an 85% chance that's going to happen here in May and June. And then there's very favorable odds that La Nina will be developing for those summer months, June through August timeframe, with a 60% chance in that timeframe that we do make that switch to La Nina. So if I look at analogous years with that late summer La Nina pattern, most recent years would be 2016 and 2020. And this really set up for that warmer and drier than average outcome as we got later in the growing season. So we did accumulate more GDUs later in the growing season and actually ended up on the drier side. Not saying that will necessarily happen again, but there are some indications that that may be the direction that we are headed. So when we talk corn maturities and where we should be at, it's pretty well known that we want to have the latest possible maturity for your growing region to maximize yield potential. So that's regardless of planting date. In Northern Iowa, Southern Minnesota, we know that that advantage can be about a bushel and a half per relative maturity day. So say 105 day versus 95 day, that 105 should out yield that 95 day 15 bushels per acre on average based on data from the last 30 years. So making sure that we're using that full length product is going to be in our best interest. With that being said, we know that soybeans can adjust for the growing season. If we have a little bit later planting date for corn, can they do the same thing? And the answer is yes, based on some research out of Purdue with Robert Nielsen. He's shown that a corn hybrid will need 6.8 fewer GDDs for every day of delay beyond that May 1st period. So for an example, if a hybrid is rated at 2600 GDDs for black layer, it would only take 2396 GDDs if it was planted on May 31st. So a corn maturity does shorten itself up to a degree when planted a little bit later. So that's the other reason that we want to stay with some later maturity corns, because they have the tendency to be able to shorten themselves up a little bit to ensure that we finish. We're taking a look at recommendations from the University of Minnesota Extension. They suggest that we should continue with your normal seed plan until May 22nd. And after that, May 22nd to the end of May, we can drop five to seven relative maturity days. And then once we get into that June timeframe, then we're going to drop it eight to 15 relative maturity units. So their suggestion is still to wait until that May 22nd timeframe before we're making a big switch or plans to change our maturity. Whereas the Iowa State University suggests that we should wait until June 1st to change those plans in the Iowa geography. When it comes to other economic management considerations as we go into a later planning season, from a population standpoint, there shouldn't be much adjustment there. If anything, we probably could lighten up the population a little bit as the potential for emergence success is greater later in the season that we get. And from a planting depth standpoint, I really don't recommend much change there because we still want that nice uniform environment for that seedling to develop in, as well as make sure that we have that nodal root system developing below the soil surface and ensuring that we have adequate anchoring ability with that structure there as well. If we transition this conversation to the soybean side of the ledger, when should we switch to an earlier season soybean? This side of the equation is much later. We really shouldn't do much adjustment to soybeans until we get into June, realistically. And that's June 5th through the 10th. If you look at most of industry and extension recommendations, it's not until that first week of June before we really consider changing anything on soybeans. And that primary reason we would shift would be more to do with part of stability and less about yield potential, actually. A lot of research has shown that after mid-May each week that planting is delayed, soybean maturity is only delayed by 2.8 days. So as we mentioned before, soybeans definitely compensate and are on daylight and night length that they adjust their growing habits. So we can see those shorten up quite a bit. And a lot of times if you go to an early maturity soybean, they can literally shorten up in height as well as yield as we shorten up that growing season for them. When it comes to seeding rate with soybeans as we get later in the season, we'll have to get well into June before we recommend increasing that seeding rate to try to get to canopy and have a few more plants out there. But up until that June time frame, we're going to keep with our normal plan. Once again, knowing that emergence likely will be better with whatever we're putting in the ground a little bit later than normal. On the other hand, we do generally see some improvement in yield the later we get in the season with narrowing up the rows. So a 15 inch situation versus a 30 will definitely help if we're in later May and June time frame to try to capture as much sunlight as possible, as well as help in that battle for wheat control. In summary, changes to our corn plan should only be made when we get to that May 20th and beyond time frame. And for soybeans, that date is closer to June 5th to the 10th. And then we can look at making some adjustments or changes. I appreciate your time today. Thanks for stopping by the Beyond the Seed series as part of the We're All Ears podcast. And look forward to talking to you again. Stay safe.

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• May 03, 2024

  E14: Focus Friday: Corn Product Placement and Crop Management Strategies

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Charles Scovill, gives an update for Michigan farmers, talks about corn product placement, and visits with Steve Wilkens, Golden Harvest Agronomy Manager about crop management strategies that you could apply to NCGA Yield Contest entries. Check in weekly for the Michigan agronomy update from Charles!

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  10 min

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist with your Focus Friday, here on Friday, May the 3rd. And this week, I want to cover a couple different items. First of all, I'm going to give you an update on that experiment we talked about last week with the GHX app. Want to talk about some questions I'm getting from producers, specifically around product placement this week. And finally, I have another guest speaker with us this week. It's a gentleman who has entered the NCGA contest for many years and has actually won some awards. He's going to give us some hints to success. But I want to jump right in and talk about, you know, last week we said we had some corn, quote unquote, planted March 1st, just for the opportunity to get a track that through the GHX app. And so the tracking on that right now shows us that that corn would have accumulated currently 91 heat units. So we're real close to early planted corn being ready to emerge, but not quite there here in mid-Michigan. The soil temperatures, it tells me, is 56 degrees. So from a 50 degree necessity for germination, we're certainly in good shape there and we're gaining heat units left and right right now as we're headed a little bit ahead of normal for temperatures. Interesting enough, though, soil moisture is, according to the GHX app, at 23%, which is below normal, which should be around 36% right now. Now, we are recording this on Thursday and we're seeing some dust flying out there, but I expect if you're listening to this on Friday, you're sitting in the rain thinking, huh, I'd rather have a little bit more dust flying to try to get some more of this crop in the ground. But we're going to do the best we can, what Mother Nature will allow. Secondly, wanted to cover the questions I'm getting right now are all about product placement. Folks are just wanting to get it right and we know we've got one chance to get it right. And interesting questions actually around root type. And one of the cool things we do within Golden Harvest is we actually rate our hybrids based upon three different root types. Penetrating, Modified, and Fibrous. And you got to kind of think through the real placement on that because if you think about a light sandy soil, a penetrating root, you just can't grow deep enough fast enough to go chase that water. So the best root type really for those lighter sandier soils is that Fibrous root, where you get that big mat of Fibrous hairs and roots out there that just catches much of that water before it escapes and gets away. Where, you know, many of the things we sell are on the modified root side, which handle about anything you throw at them. And then when we do get into those tight plays, that's where we find those penetrating roots tend to do their best. And so, as always, work with your Golden Harvest Seed Advisor, Agronomist or Sales Rep out there to make sure that, boy, before we put that stuff in the ground, we've got the right product on the right acre. And that's a good recipe for success. Speaking of success, I have with us today, a guest speaker, Mr. Steve Wilkens. And he is our Eastern Agronomy Manager, and it's kind of exciting over the years that he's entered the NCGA contest. He's actually won some state awards over in Wisconsin. So, Steve, welcome. How are you doing today? Doing well, Charles. Thanks for the invite and to join you here this morning. Great to have you. And so jumping right into the questions, you know, what right now is top of mind to you in planting your NCGA contest cornfields this year? That's a great question, Charles. The first thing and arguably maybe the most important is patience in spring. We talk as myself and agronomists all the time about the importance of the planter pass, making sure that we have the right conditions is the best conditions that we possibly can when you look at contest type yields, because our spacing, our emergence and the uniformity that we need to get there really sets the rest of the year as far as yield potential. So in many cases, I would say our fields or our plots are made or broke with the planter pass. And as we're sitting here in early May, that is the number one priority that would be on top of my mind. I couldn't agree more. We get one chance to get it right each year there and contest score is especially important that way. We sometimes learn the most from the times where we do make mistakes out there. And I'm sure that you probably look back on some things and said, maybe I should have tried something different there. But thinking back, what is the biggest mistake that you've made in trying to win this contest that others might avoid? It's a really good question. And someone could take that many different ways. When I think of myself and my situation years before I ever entered the contest, you would read, you would learn, you would try to glean information from other people who've entered the contest and had successes in the past. And I certainly think there's value in it, but nothing is more important than a grower being out in their fields, understanding their fields and understanding what works for them and what doesn't. So if I think back to what have I messed up in the past, some of it would be trying things that I never should have tried because other people in other states are doing it. They don't fit the practices that we have locally in each and all of our own environments. So that would be one of the biggest things is know what works for you. Don't always worry about what other people are doing. Certainly, it's interesting to hear about and to think and contemplate those practices you could adopt in your farm. But by far and large, the areas that I found success on, whether it's the products that I plant or the practices that I use, I wouldn't say they're highly used practices by other people in the contest. So that would be one thing. Maybe one a little bit more pertinent. Some things that have been a larger mistake for me is I used to run a significant amount of products in furrow and I was getting my salt content a little too high. And that was creating some pretty sizable germination issues in eastern Wisconsin where my family and I farm. We have heavier soils, so I typically don't worry about not having enough water in the soil profile. They have salt issues and I was starting to. So I really had to reevaluate what goes in what we call our pop-up fertilizer that goes on the seed. And even with that, we changed from putting the pop-up on top of the seed to under the seed to try to change a few things around a placement. So small differences can make a big difference actually in that area. So that might be the biggest one I threw out there that I've had some issues with. Well, that sure is a great thing to think about. And as we get our listeners to think about growing more yields on their own farms there, we've had a lot of folks over the last couple of years that have entered Golden Harvest corn in the NCGA contest here in Michigan. And we're always looking for more people to do that. So I guess my final question for you is, if I'm going to try this for the very first time this year, what advice would you give them for getting started? Michigan's had some really strong success over the years. And even though it's a very diverse state, there's a lot of yield potential and some very high yields that have come from the state of Michigan, the corn growers. So certainly, the yield environment is there to really push yields into the national type category, 3-400 bushel range. For a first time grower, someone new to it, if you're a little bit unsure about maybe the field or even the hybrid that you want to enter, I would base a lot of it off of my early season stand counts and my observations with Emergence. The challenge that many of us have as growers is when our first planted corn is emerging and we should be in the field looking at it, we're still on the tractor planting or we're in the sprayer and we have a lot of other things going on that are competing for our time. But if you have the opportunity, start to select and pick your fields based off of where you have the most even and uniform emergence. So if you're a first time person, that's where I would focus the majority of my time. And then I would also say if you find the areas of your farm where you've got good consistent emergence and then other areas that you don't, even if you don't have a good yield that might win a corn growers, monitor the change in yield and then take that to the profitability. See if you can cascade something like that over the rest of your farm because the corn growers is about a contest and is about raising yield. But for many of us like myself and even the customers that you work with, Charles, it's about increasing the overall yield and profitability of the growers that we work with and their farms as well. So I think that is the most important part of any yield contest, specifically even the corn growers here. Well, Steve, that is some excellent advice and I really appreciate you taking the time to jump on the podcast with us here today and keeping in mind that it's not always just a single field, but we need to pick up the best field out there for that contest field this year. So with that, I just want to wrap things up today and say, be spending this time, if it is raining out there, making sure you get those products placed in the right fields. Look at those root types. And at the end of the day, we got one chance to get it right. So let's be patient. Let this soil dry back out again. And hit her hard as soon as we can. With that, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist with your Focus Friday. Have a great week.

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• May 02, 2024

  E13: Kernels of Agronomy: Crop Stand and Emergence Impact on Yield Potential

  Catch up with Golden Harvest Agronomist, Wayde Looker, to hear about planting date and crop stand impact on yield potential in both corn and soybeans. He also discusses a study around the uniformity of corn emergence and the influence on yield potential which drives home the point of planting into the best soil conditions possible.

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  9 min

  Additional Resources

  • Agronomy Guide
  • Corn Hybirds Planting Dates
  • Importance of Corn Stand Uniformity
  • Factors Influencing Soybean Planting Date Response

  Episode Transcript

  Hello and welcome to the Golden Harvest. We're All Ears podcast, where we will feature agronomic insights from across the Midwest to answer pressing questions and help spark discussions. Thanks for joining us. Welcome back to the Kernels of Agronomy Podcast here with Wade Looker, your Golden Harvest agronomist for Ohio and the East. And today, I want to take a little bit of time and just give a planting update. This week has been a really productive week across much of central and southern Ohio, as well as our areas out east. And so just wanted to take you through that and let you know where progress was. So starting in north west Ohio and north central Ohio, unfortunately, there's been very little planted up there thus far. Rain continues to delay the true start of planting. There's been a few fields here and there that have went in, but really, that's been the wettest area of our geography. And based upon the rain last night, looks like it's going to continue to be that way. So very little done in that region. However, as you move further south and east, progress really begins to pick up. I know the Dark County area has had a really strong start with some growers already finishing up their corn. So that's very exciting for those guys out there. And progress has also been really strong across central Ohio, including here where I'm at, just north of Columbus, with certain growers around here also wrapping up corn. This is the exception rather than the norm. It's still not a majority of corn acres that have been planted, but some of those guys that have some drier ground or were pretty aggressive and really got a lot of acres in in a hurry. They have wrapped up, so it's very exciting for them moving south. We see similar amounts of field work being accomplished with growers and pick way county off to a really strong start as well. So really lots of progress has really taken place over the past week or so across much of our trade area. And I want to give a shout out to our customers, our eastern Pennsylvania and the Delmarva, as they are off to a really good start to where some of their crops are even emerging. So we've got some 14 B 32 that's come out of the ground as well as a variety of different soybean varieties. So really good stuff happening out there as well. Last night's rain will put a halt, albeit probably a brief halt to most of the city as rain passed through last night into this morning. Rainfall amounts varied from a 10th in some areas of central Ohio to over an inch in areas of western and northwest Ohio. So with this slight rainfall in specific regions, I do anticipate us getting back into the fields here before the end of the week and before these rains this weekend. So pretty exciting there as we get crops planted, The next thing that we're going to start talking a lot about is emergence and the importance of uniform emergence and planning dates as well. So there was a really neat study a few years ago done by the University of Illinois where they took the stand count and associated that with the planting date of that stand and then evaluated the yield based upon that. So what I'm going to cover here is both corn and soybeans. So here we'll start out with corn. If we had like a really perfect stand right here in these planning days between April 21st and say today, which is April 30th, we're looking at a 97 to 100% top, a new potential still available to us. So really, really high yield potential. However, even if we had a perfect stand later on into, let's say, a month from now, towards the end of May, we've dropped that down to 87 to 90% of our top and yield potential. So just based on planting date alone, it really goes to show how important that planning date is because we lose around 8%, maybe 10% of our top end yield potential, really just based on planting date alone. If all things are perfect when we transition over to soybeans. That's a very similar story. So let's say we go out. We had a really good stand and we have 140,000 that was planted this week. Then we get today's April 30th. That gives us 98 to 100% of our top end meal potential. Fast forward a month from now. We're still trying to plant soybeans, and I'm sure that we will be in certain areas of our region more down to around 85 to 90% of our top end potential. So there we've lost somewhere between 10 to 15% of our top annual potential based on planting date alone. The other thing to take into account here is our plant stand count and how important that is relative to planting date. So what I mean by that, let's discuss that a little bit further. Let's say over the course of this weekend, we get some really heavy rains and we have some crusting issues or we have some drowning issues and we lose part of our stand. So on the soybean side, let's say instead of a stand of 140,000, let's say we have a stand of 70,000 now. Well, based upon our planning date, even at 70,000, because we have a strong planting date, we're still up over 90% of our top annual potential. So we really haven't lost that much yield potential at all because we're able to use more of that sunshine, have a longer growing season, promote more branching, and those soybean plants are really able to compensate well for that. You fast forward a month. Let's say we plant there towards the end of May and we have a similar weather event and we lose a similar amount of stay in. Let's say we're down to 70,000 once again or that point again more down to 80% of our top end yield potential or so. And so even based on that alone planting date, there to made up about 10% of our topping yield potential. So not only does it work well, this chart work well when we're evaluating perfect stands, but it also does a really good job of showing the importance of 90 day when we have imperfect stands as well. You know, I'm way less worried about maybe some thin stands than spots on these April planet crops than I am if they were planted, you know, late May, early June. With that, the evaluation of our stand is going to be important as well. We've partnered very well with precision planting over the past few years. They do a fantastic job of really illustrating how important it is to have uniform emerge and specifically with corn. And so they have done a really cool study over the past few years, a four year study here, where they've evaluated the emergence timing from plant to plant on corn. So they're opinion is they want as many of those corn seeds of those corn plants to emerge within the same 12 hour period as possible. They found that that corn that emerges within 12 hours of each other really has uniform ears. Excellent top and your potential as that changes as we get less uniform emergence, things really do start to change. So they found that going from a 12 hour emergence window to a 24 hour emergence window actually dropped the top end yield potential by about 8%, which is really interesting because we normally think of having everything emerge in 24 hours as being the goal. Like, really, really good. And I would make the claim that it is good, but we are still giving up top End potential when we don't get it in that 12 hour window. From there, things drop off in a hurry. You know, if it's within the 36 hour window, the data says yield falls by about 31% on those years of 48 hour window. You know, if your neighbor plant comes up 48 hours later, that neighbor plant is going to be down by 69%. And anything over 48 hours really does become a weed that results in devastating yield losses of about 80% on those particular plants. So very, very important to have not only good planning dates, but also planning into the right conditions so that we're able to get that uniform emergence that corn so desperately needs. Thanks again for tuning in to episode three of the Kernels of Agronomy Podcast. I'm your host, Wade Looker, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks again. It has been great to have you with us on this podcast. This has been Golden Harvest. We're all ears. You won't want to miss our upcoming episodes, so subscribe to We're All Ears on your preferred podcast streaming platform. And remember, just like you're listening, we're listening to. So join the conversation and interact with us at Golden Harvest on Facebook or Twitter or at Golden Harvest Seeds on Instagram. And tell us what you thought of the episode. Thanks for listening to We're All Ears. We'll catch it in the next episode.

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• May 01, 2024

  E12: Planting Update for Southern Iowa

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Ben Whaley, provides a planting and crop emergence update for his territory across Southern Iowa. Rain makes planting progress stop and go - he talks about what to plant and how to evaluate when soils are ready to plant into again. Spring herbicide applications are also important for weed control so it is something to keep in mind when scheduling field activities around the weather forecast. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to your local Golden Harvest Agronomist, Seed Advisor or GHX Specialist. And remember, just like you’re listening, we’re listening too. So join the conversation and interact with us at Golden Harvest on Facebook or Twitter, or at Golden Harvest Seeds on Instagram. We’d love to hear what you think. Thanks for taking time to be with us on this episode of We’re All Ears.

  Play Now

  6 min

  Episode Transcript

  Welcome back to the Golden Harvest We're All Ears podcast, where we will feature agronomic insights from across the Midwest to answer pressing questions and help spark discussions. Golden Harvest is dedicated to partnering with farmers to deliver custom solutions for each unique agronomic challenge. Thanks for joining us. Hello, folks. This is Ben Whaley, agronomist for Southern Iowa for Golden Harvest. We had quite the week last week, big planting week. With rain at the end, we caught a good window. I'd say we had some good weather last week. You might have thought that maybe we'd only get a couple days in with some rain chances on Wednesday, but we took most of those out and we had a good week. You know, the soil temperature did go under 50 for a little bit, but it quickly came back up, up into the 50 and rising like we want for good planting weather. Later in the week, I would say that planting conditions were around near perfect. The really good tilty soils, nice moisture on top, just what we're looking for for that late April planting of optimal corn performance. Looking at my numbers and the different people that I've talked to throughout my area, throughout Western Iowa and Eastern Iowa, I've gathered, I think, you know, corn is about 60% planted in Western, beans are about 50 in Western Iowa. With Eastern Iowa, they got a little bit more rain early on. I think the corn is about 40% at that time and about 25% planted over there in Eastern Iowa. Like I said, we had a good run. I think we got a lot planted in really good conditions. You know, one thing I always stress is we got to make sure that the soil is fit when we start planting again. There's a lot of corn planted there that April 10th to 14th window. The current GDU for the April 12th planted corn is around 110, 130. We need 90 to 120 for corn to emerge. And that is in the best environment. We had some colder rains. We dropped down below 50 for soil temperature for a couple of days. We didn't get real good heat units for what we would want with good sun. Really, we just got wind in some cloudy days that maybe got over 65. Those aren't the greatest GDUs that we can get and not the greatest growing three days. Now, I have done quite a bit of scouting throughout southern Iowa, and it is pretty close. The one thing I will say is the stuff that was planted there, that April 10th through 14th window, a lot of that stuff was worked. It worked pretty fine. It worked up into a fluff, and we planted into that fluff, which is fine. We planted into two, two and a half inches. It kind of pushed down a little bit, but then we got that big pounding rain. That just pushed down the dirt and made it more compact, and then we got a lot of wind and some sun, and it has developed a crust. The crust is probably a quarter to three inches deep from what I've seen, and I think this rain we're getting today is actually a blessing for that crust. It will break up that crust. Let those plants kind of be relieved of all the pressures that they're trying to push up through the soil, and we should see some really good convergence coming out of this. And one other thing I mean, throughout my travels, I've seen some NH3 and hydrogen ammonia being put on still. Make sure we leave that for at least five days and let it rest. We don't want that to be too hot when we plant and maybe affect that seed or burn the seed a little bit. As far as planting dates, research and data shows that we still have optimal yield potential for corn if it's planted before May 5th. And even with that, still have 95% yield potential until May 20th, so nothing to really worry about. Soybeans are on the same kind of trajectory maybe a little earlier. Our data in my trials say soybeans show the best yield at planting before April 25th, with the yield decreasing by a quarter percent of yield a day going forward. Coming up here, when we start to get the plants ready to go and everything starts to get fit again, let's remember we need to get that good seed-soil bed, get the good seed-to-soil contact for corn, keep that optimal yield potential at 100% for as long as we can. When it does start getting fit and we think we're close, maybe you think, oh, we'll give it another day or maybe we can push it, if you got some beans to plant, plant those beans for that day. Let the beans sit in that un-perfect soil bed. If we lose 10,000 to 20,000 stand of beans right now, beans will flex and really use that space that you're giving them. We can't afford to make mistakes on corn at this point. If we lose 3,000 to 4,000 stand because maybe we went a little early, smeared the sidewall, gave some compaction, weren't able to fracture those layers and actually make that good seed to soil contact in the seed bed and make that furrow fracture, we could be down to 30, 35, 30, 32, maybe even less than that. Then we're taking away our yield potential for that corn stand. Try to plant beans if maybe you're wanting to go early and thinking you need to get a lot done. That's fine. Let's plant some beans. One last thing, wind has been blowing terribly, just like every other day in Iowa, it seems like. That leaves us very little time to spray. I would say make this a priority. We can't afford to have escapes in our corn fields, early corn fields. If we have escapes, those escapes will start taking away yield potential very quickly because it takes the nutrients that young seedling and that young plant needs. So we've got to get those plants killed before that happens. Once again, this is Ben Whaley, Golden Harvest Agronomist in Studden, Iowa. This is the We're All Ears podcast. Be safe. Plant on. This is Golden Harvest We're All Ears. We look forward to having you join our next episode. Don't miss it by subscribing to We're All Ears on your preferred podcast streaming platform. And remember, just like you're listening, we're listening too. So join the conversation and interact with us at Golden Harvest on Facebook or Twitter or at Golden Harvest Seeds on Instagram. We'd love to hear what you think. Thanks for taking the time to be with us on this episode of We're All Ears. The next episode will be coming soon.

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• Apr 30, 2024

  E11: Beyond the Seed: Bean Leaf Beetles on Soybeans and Crop Emergence Update

  Let's connect with Golden Harvest Agronomist, Adam Mayer, to get a crop progress update from the field and to learn about the potential of bean leaf beetles in soybeans this year. The weather has been variable in his territory this spring which means that crop planting progress is also variable. Regardless of when you planted your crop, he encourages you to go out and check on the progress. Bean leaf beetle may be a potential pest this year in soybeans. Know what to look for when scouting early season soybeans.

  Play Now

  9 min

  Additional Resources

  • Bean Leaf Beetle Soybeans
  • Soybean Seed Treatments

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, welcome to Beyond the Seeds series as a part of our We're All Ears podcast. I'm your host, Adam Mayer, agronomist for Golden Harvest, covering Northeast Iowa and into Southern Minnesota as well. So today's topics, first we're gonna start with just the current status of planting and a few things going on out in the fields. And then we'll transition into a potential pest problem with bean leaf beetles after that. So currently there's been some progress on the planting front on both crops, ranging from growers all the way done with both corn and soybeans to some growers haven't even pulled the planter out of the shed yet. So we're gonna have a wide array of planting dates, conditions and things to watch throughout the growing season. So it should be a very interesting growing season from an agronomic perspective. That first planted corn and soybeans in the 13th, 14th of April timeframe, that corn or soybeans has been in the ground for about 12 days now. And we have accumulated about 73 GDUs in the ambition to get to 100, 120 GDUs for emergence. So we have had a start on that and the evidence is there when I dig up the seedlings. This morning, I dug up some seedlings from both the corn and soybean field planted on April 14th. And they developmentally were very similar. And they had about a half inch radical, quarter to half inch radical, started on most seedlings out there. And so they're just getting a nice start and everything was viable and seeming to be healthy and ready to make emergence in the coming days. So those soil temperatures have been kind of hanging around that 50 degree mark for some time now. We did have a couple of dips late last week that we got a little cool at night to brought it down. But for the most part, from here on and what the forecast shows is we should be at that 50 mark or right around there and then hopefully on the way up. From moisture standpoint, conditions were very good in most cases for what's been going in the ground. There are definitely geographies that had more or less rain and therefore fields were either more or less fit. And so you'll definitely see geographies that are further along than others with that variance in rainfall. My biggest watch out for the next 10 to 12 days will be around that emergence. So there's been some forecasts of heavier rains potentially. And with that becomes potential for emergence problems from a crusting or ponding type of standpoint. So we're definitely going to be on the lookout for that. My biggest potential problem fields would be those fields that were worked more intensively. And specifically those, when we talk soybeans that were heavily worked and rolled field is probably going to have the potential to have some crusting issues more than other fields. And part of the reason is we have a greater effect from the raindrop impact, which will break up those soil colloids and also clog up some of the pores that allow for better infiltration of that rainfall, especially when it comes at an increased heavier rate. The potential is also there for sheet erosion, more prevalently on a flat surface as opposed to something with some ridges or some residue that can slow down that water movement. When you're on a tabletop, that water just gains momentum and speed and will actually make the problem worse the more rain we get on that. So definitely on the lookout for those emergence issues as we move forward, especially getting towards that eighth, ninth, 10th of May will be when that emergence will probably be taking place on those fields that were planted this week. The next topic I do want to cover is around a well-known pest with bean leaf beetle. And this is not necessarily a perennial problem, but one that comes around with the right environmental conditions. And this may be the year that we're going to see some increased activity, mostly because of higher survivability with one of the mildest winters we've had on history. So bean leaf beetles will die generally if they are exposed to temperatures 14 degrees Fahrenheit or lower. And part of their normal survivability is based off of how much of a blanket they can find. So they're going to be underneath a residue or in the soil itself to try to protect themselves from the elements and the cold weather. This year, that was probably easier than normal. Iowa State came out with a article that suggests that mortality was probably in the 50% range for Northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota with the normal being more around 70% mortality. So we definitely have the potential for more survivors causing damage to soybeans during the growing season. So if we look at the life cycle of bean leaf beetles, they start as that adult in the soil and when they emerge, they will start feeding on some early vegetation, a lot of times in a alfalfa field or some other grassy area. And then they will move into those first emerged soybean fields to start feeding there. So we know that protection is very key early in the season and that's why we do normally use insecticide with our seed treatment package on soybeans. This is one of those benefits that we get out of that seed treatment is bean leaf beetle protection, especially with the systemic type of product. The problem needs to be controlled early in the season because there will be at least two generations in our geography a year of bean leaf beetles. So that adults will feed early in the season, but then we'll lay eggs in the field, which will hatch and the larvae will feed on some of our soybean roots. Pupation will occur and the adults will merge. And once again, start feeding on foliar vegetation, taking away from our green leaf area on the soybeans as well. Another not so fun fact about bean leaf beetles is that they can harbor and be a carrier transmitter for bean pod model virus. So this is something that is infected early in the season or during the vegetative stages and then can cause some seed quality issues later in the season as well. So they are primary carrier for that bean pod model virus. So what does that bean leaf beetle look like and what's the identification? A lot of times they can be confused with corn rootworm adult beetle. So they have a very similar size and appearance. These bean leaf beetles can be multiple colors from tan to orange to reddish and their identifying factor will be the triangle that's right on the top of their wings, right behind their head. There will be a triangle there and that's what signifies a bean leaf beetle. In summary, we'll be on the lookout for bean leaf beetles, especially if we don't have that insecticide as part of our seed treatment package. And the last thing will be keeping an eye on emergence and making sure that we aren't going to have reduced stands, especially to the point of replant as we move forward. Thanks for jumping on the Beyond the Seed series and I invite you to check out some other insights from other agronomists on the We're All Ears podcast. Many have some nice ideas with other broad topics that can be relevant for our geography as well. With that, if you have any other questions, you can email at Adam.Mayer, at syngenta.com, M-A-Y-E-R. And I hope you have a great, safe spring.

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• Apr 29, 2024

  E10: Cultivating Success: Corn Emergence Evaluation

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Andrew Rupe, is back this week with a discussion on evaluating corn emergence. Let's get out in the field and dig up some corn seed and seedlings to evaluate our planting pass and how the crop is emerging.

  Play Now

  9 min

  Additional Resources

  • Agronomy Guide

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, folks, thanks for tuning in to the We're All Ears podcast, presented by Golden Harvest, and my sub-series titled Cultivating Success. My name is Andrew Rupe, your Golden Harvest Agronomist in Eastern Iowa, and it is Friday, April 26th, and we are currently getting a rain front moving in across Eastern Iowa. We've had a really nice week this week of getting some planting progress moving along. My best estimation for my geography is we're probably somewhere around 30 to 40% planted for corn and soybeans in Eastern Iowa. So we had some activity that kind of started up Monday for some guys, but really Tuesday through Thursday, there was just a lot of corn planters and soybean planters rolling. I would actually say that maybe we've had a little bit more progress on soybeans compared to corn, and I think a big contributing factor to that is just the fact that we did have some cooler nights this past week. We had some lows that got down into the 30s. I had some frost and freeze warnings that we kind of had to watch out for, and I think that maybe had guys just a little bit more gun shy on planting corn, and we may have had a little bit more of soybean progress this past week. I have some growers that haven't planted a single kernel of corn yet, and I have some growers that haven't planted a single bean yet. And so I've seen it both directions. Just kind of depends on what the growers' preference is, what he has for rotation, how many acres he has to cover, number of planters, manpower, all those different things kind of roll into how they kind of plan out their planting plans for the year. So I will say I've been out to a couple of the first planted fields that we've had in Eastern Iowa. Some of those ones that got planted right around that 10th of April and just digging up the crop. We know nothing was really emerged yet, but digging up the crop, it looks like we're off to a good start. We had uniform size and a lot of those seedlings. The radical length in corn was very, very uniform. It was right around inch and a half, maybe close to two inches long. So it was showing some nice radical length. And then that coleoptile was starting to poke through the seedling, maybe get a little bit closer to the soil surface. But I would expect that we'd probably not see spiking until about next weekend, right around the May 5th, May 3rd time frame, something like that. Whenever we'd start to see some of those early planted corn fields and maybe bean fields as well, start to emerge around that time frame. That kind of leads into the one topic I wanted to cover today, which is corn emergence evaluation. So when you're out there visiting those first planted corn fields, what are the things that you could encounter and what might be the cause of some of the issues that you might see out in that field? So there's a few things that I wanted to cover, but one of the first things that sometimes will come across if there's an issue is runt plants or gaps out in the field. And what is that caused by? Well, it could be a number of things. You know, if we see plants that are at V2, V1, and then maybe we have some that are just starting to spike. Why is that the case? Well, a lot of it comes down to how we planted the crop and what are the conditions that we planted the crop into? Did we have consistent planting depth where all those seedlings were placed into consistent moisture? Why is that important? Because basically, we want that seedling to start taking its drink and starting the germination process at the same time. And if we planted a little bit shallower, maybe that got into a little bit more of a drier dirt, and we didn't start that germination process until some moisture hit that seedling. Another issue that we could see is that maybe we had some residue in the furrow that dried up around that seedling. We've seen that before, some hairpin residue that is right up against that seedling instead of good seed to soil, moist seed to soil contact. All right, so a couple other issues that we could come across. Another thing that I tend to see occasionally in the spring to early summer time frame is leafing out underground or also sometimes some people call it like a corkscrewed mesocotyl. So what is the cause of that corkscrewing or that swirling of the shoot underground? Well, generally that involves some type of resistance against that seedling. That plant's shoot was basically trying to push up through the soil, hit some layer of resistance, and then it crunched that plant together and didn't allow for a nice straight plant to come out of the ground. So a lot of times those issues could be soil crusting if we had heavy rains and then kind of baked a crust on that soil surface. Other things could be if we used a little bit more aggressive closing wheel pressure to close that furrow. So if we put a little bit extra resistance on those springs for those closing wheels to close it, we could pack some of the dirt around that and cause a little bit more resistance for that seedling to come out of the ground. Another thing could be just cloddy soils. Did we work that ground whenever it was maybe just a little bit too wet? Caused some clods and then those big heavy dirt clods are basically right over top some of those seedlings and it couldn't push its way up past that clod super easily. Those are just some of the causes that we could see for leafing out underground. Some of the other things that I'm looking for whenever we're out there checking fields is whenever I'm digging up seedlings, I want to see what that furrow slice that the planter made looks like. Do we still have that sidewall furrow in the ground? And if that's the case, that's not necessarily a good thing. The goal of a corn planter is really to cut a slice in the ground, place that seedling down at the bottom of that furrow, and then smash that furrow closed. If we still see that sidewall compaction, then what does that mean? Well, that means that we could be impacting the root growth and restricting that root growth later into the season. So that's just something to kind of look at whenever we're out there checking plants and digging in the dirt. One other thing I want to check too is obviously the appearance of the seedling and what that looks like because sometimes we can see some salt damage to the seedlings as well that may impact our stand, may impact our root growth as well, especially that seminal root system. So if we're using a pop-up starter type of fertilizer that maybe has a little bit higher salt content, sometimes and especially in drier conditions, we can get a little bit of toxicity on that seedling. What does that look like? Well, a lot of times that'll look like a little bit of a rotted seedling or the seminal root system will turn brown or black and it has a very unhealthy look. You know, a nice white color is a healthy system. Brown or black is really more of a damaged seedling or damaged root system. So those are some things that I'm kind of looking out for early in the season whenever we're looking at corn emergence and corn stand evaluation. If you got any questions about this, reach out to your local Golden Harvest Seed Advisor, Agronomist, sales rep, GHX specialist. I appreciate you guys all tuning in to this episode of the We're All Ears podcast. My name is Andrew Rupe, Agronomist in Eastern Iowa. We'll catch you next time.

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• Apr 26, 2024

  E09: Focus Friday: Frost on Soybeans and Corn Production ROI Talk

  Check in to see what is going on in Michigan agriculture this week with Golden Harvest Agronomist, Charles Scovill. This week he is talking about freezing temperatures on soybeans and brought in guest, Stephanie Smith, Golden Harvest Corn Product Manager, to get her take on corn production and return on investment (ROI).

  Play Now

  10 min

  Additional Resources

  • Golden Harvest Agronomy
  • Frost Damage In Corn And Soybeans

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist, here with our Focus Friday on April the 26th. And wow, what an exciting night last night it was, with some really sub-freezing temperatures getting down to around 28 degrees here, and I know even colder up in the thumb. Starting out with sharing a little bit of an experiment that I'm working on. Secondly, I want to talk about evaluating some frost damage on soybeans. And third, I actually have a special guest with us today that I think you're going to be excited to hear from. So let's jump right in here and talk about that experiment that I'm working on. So we have a new mobile app, the GHX mobile app, and I've been playing around with that. It's actually something that you can get your hands on if you talk to your local Golden Harvest sales rep or seed advisor. But what it does is I actually put in there that I had planted corn on the 1st of March just to get the program rolling. Now, I didn't really do that, but the app doesn't know that. But what I did is when you put the hybrids in there and you put the planting date as well as the maturity of that hybrid, it will follow that hybrid all the way through harvest. So, I know that if I would have planted that on the 1st of March, that hybrid has actually accumulated 55 growing degree day units or heat units out there. Now, you say, well, that sounds like a lot, but it's not really because I need 120 of those to get to emergence. And so, but I can keep tracking that and I will throughout the season. What it also tells me is by field that my soil temperature right now is 42 degrees out there in that field. My soil moisture is 22 percent. Say, well, does that really mean? Well, normal today would be 38 percent. So certainly far drier than normal, even with the recent rains we got. And so we're going to keep following this experiment out there, but it's exciting to kind of know where that crop is just with the addition of the GHX mobile app there. So something to share with you real quick. We'll keep you updated. Secondly, I got a call last night, a young man that was a little worried about his soybeans. He planted them early. They were starting to emerge. He said, Charles, am I going to lose them tonight? And so we talked through that a little bit. And the first thing, of course, is that we know that time will tell. We won't know for a few days what really happened. But the good news is soybeans really can handle a fair amount of cold weather. I've heard before about 28 degrees for a couple of hours, and they'll still be fine. What I've found from experience, though, is on these soybeans, wind is our friend. So as long as we have some air movement, we don't seem to see that frost settle down and kill those beans or any crop, for that matter, nearly as quickly. Oftentimes, though, near those edges of the fields where we've got a barrier that's slowing that wind down, that's where we see the frost damage showing up first. So we'll continue to watch that. Got another cold night coming at us, but not nearly as cold as that one. But when we do evaluate those beans, we're going to look at that growing point, that spot right in the center of those two cotyledons. And if that turns brown, we better be starting to think about replant on those soybeans. So thirdly today, I have a special guest with us, and that is our new Eastern Corn Product Manager for Golden Harvest, Ms. Stephanie Smith. And I've worked with Stephanie for a number of years here, just ecstatic to have her in this new role, bringing products to us here in Michigan and the Eastern US. I've asked her to share a couple of things with us today. The first is to answer a question I've been getting, and that is, should I plant corn or soybeans this year? Secondly is, beyond genetics, where's my best first dollar spent on corn production? And finally, I want to get her top three things on her bucket list that she can bring to Michigan farmers over the next couple years in this new role. So Stephanie, welcome. Good morning, Charles. Thanks for the invitation to join your podcast. Absolutely. Great to have you. And just couldn't be more excited about having you in this new role, a Michigan person helping to determine the products that we're going to have available for Golden Harvest over the next few years. So let's jump right into those questions. Help my farmers understand here. Should I plant corn or soybeans this year? The markets are interesting. What's your take? It's a great question. You know, when we take a look at the commodity markets, you know, wheat has rallied here recently. Corn has had a bit of movement. But when we take a year over year analysis, right, we're just in a very different position. So from the cost of inputs, which have decreased a bit, and with the commodity markets, everyone's asking, what do I do? You know, in my mind, I kind of boil it down to the simplest form. You know, when we try to outguess the market, how successful can we be? You know, I think about the risk and reward of changing crop rotation when it comes to field fertility, when it comes to disease management. And for me, when I try to outguess something, typically I'm wrong. So, you know, I think in the state of Michigan, keeping with rotation, keeping with the plan, rather than trying to outguess where commodities are going to be, I think we're going to be a bit better off, Charles. Well, it's interesting, too, and it makes me think of the old adage I've always heard is, whatever you hear guys talking about doing at the coffee shop, do the opposite. Bingo. Absolutely. It's what we can do in one year of not altering our rotation. We can really have lasting ramifications in those fields. And agronomically, sometimes those are hard to overcome. I couldn't agree more. So the next question I was thinking about is, you know, beyond genetics, which we've certainly seen some great improvements over the years. But beyond that, what is my best first dollar spent in corn production in a year where we're really watching those finances? Yeah, we are absolutely pinching pennies. So the first response to that question, Charles, is a very costly one. What's the best thing I can do to affect my ROI? It's called field tile. And the closer you can space them, the better. However, I do know that sometimes to put tile in, that takes a few years to get alignment. If we're in a place this year where we're going to the field, I really like to take a look at our fertility programs. You know, every company in the industry can produce seeds that can yield 600 bushels an acre. We've seen that in our NCGA competitions. It's all of our opportunity and roles to help unlock that genetic potential. And a lot of that comes from how we feed that plant, when we feed that plant, and what nutrients in our variable soil types across Michigan that we truly need and maybe ones that we don't. So when it comes to fertility, I think that's the best bang for the buck. And with that said, it's not just always pouring more on. Sometimes it's about timing, and sometimes it's about placement as well. I couldn't agree more. I think, you know, placement rather of nutrients there versus traditional broadcasting makes just so much sense, and especially with nitrogen and sulfur and some of those things. So I appreciate that. And then the last thing I want to talk about here, I guess, is, you know, I know you've just been in this new role a couple of weeks now, but as you think forward, what are the top three things that are on your bucket list to bring to Michigan farmers that are planning Golden Harvest Seed in the future? That's a tall ask, right? You know, what is top of mind? What is top of mind today is understanding soil variability, right? When we think about when we advance corn hybrids, typically those are on our best soils with a lot of care taken and, you know, really going after top end yield. And trust me, I want that as well, but also understanding the variability of our soils. When we go to those sandy loams that don't hold water as well and when we have lower CECs, you know, how do we get these hybrids to show up under variability? So when I think about our processes, I think about what we've done to control our controllables, right? We're dealing with the environment. We're dealing with changing weather. We're dealing with living organisms. And, you know, as Syngenta, we do a two-year testing process to start because no two-year growing seasons are alike. We have multiple locations across our area and specifically here in Michigan to gather different climate, different soil type, different management. And we're also replicating within site, too, to make sure, you know, a sprayer track or a patch of, you know, a giant ragweed doesn't throw the distribution of that yield as well. So for me, I want top end yield and I want hybrids that we can push and we can manage to unlock yield potential. That's my name of the game. And with that said, we can still unlock yield potential under, you know, field averages of 150. If we take 150 to 170, we've been a lot better as well. So really understanding that genetic variability component to unlock yield across our variability across the state. That's truly exciting because, you know, high end yields and as well as consistency of yields under the type of soils we deal with here in Michigan, that'll make success in the future. So Stephanie, I really appreciate your time jumping on here today. And folks, we're going to continue to watch this weather, continue to collect heat units out there. And for those folks that are waiting to get the crop in the ground, I think we got some warming temperatures coming here in the next week or two. So it's going to be Katie bar the door at this point in time. Once we get through this weekend, get those soils back into condition. We're excited about the year to come. So again, this Charles Scovill with Stephanie Smith here on our Focus Friday here on the 26th of April. Have a great week.

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• Apr 24, 2024

  E08: We're All Ears: Plant for Success

  Golden Harvest Agronomy Manager, Adam Haag, and Agronomist, Jamie Kathol, talk about what is going on in Nebraska and ask the question, is it time to plant? They offer some considerations for planting for success this season around soil temperature, planting depth and early season weed management. Hear about what is going on in the Western Corn Belt this spring.

  Play Now

  11 min

  Additional Resources

  • Agronomy Guide
  • Early Soybean Planting

  Episode Transcript

  Good morning, folks, thank you for tuning in to our Golden Harvest We're All Ears podcast. My name is Adam Haag. I'm the Golden Harvest Agronomy Manager for the Western Business Unit. And this morning, I have one of my team members, Jamie Kathol, joining me. He's the Northeast Nebraska Agronomist. This morning, Jamie and I are going to dive into a question we've been getting quite a bit here over the last week or so. And hey, it's late April. In fact, today is April 23rd. Does that mean it's time to plant? I think for a lot of people, it depends, and no one likes to get that answer. But Jamie's going to do a good job of diving into that here this morning as we unpack and help people make that right decision. But Jamie, before we do that, I'd invite you and ask you to maybe give the audience a little bit of a recap on the weather that we've experienced here over the last week or so. Thanks, Adam. The territory I cover has been a little bit of a tale of two stories, I guess, over the last week or 10 days or so. So the north central to northeast part of my territory, you know, mostly the northern part of my geography has been a little on the wetter side, I guess. We had plenty of areas last week where two to up to five inches of rain. The southeast part of my territory in that Tekamah, Omaha area, have been a little on the drier side. So they were wishing they had a little bit more rain last week. And some areas had such heavy rains that they couldn't all soak in fast enough. So in the north part, there were some beans that were in the ground already at that time, where the heavy rains came. So in them situations, there may even be some areas where people are going to have to patch in some replant. The low areas where that soil settled might need to be replanted from getting covered up and hitting up some of the waterways where the water ran. So overall, you know, last weekend, we had some 80 degree temps kind of ramped up that soil temperature up into the 60s. And then a few days later, we had a cold spell across my entire geography and the soil temps slid back down. You know, looking at some data here for Hardington where I live, we've had about a 20 degree soil temps swing in the last 10 days. So the southern part of my territory did get some corn planted before any of that rain came and before that cool off. And in pretty much all the situations where corn was planted, it had some nice soil temperatures the first 48 hours. So we got that corn germinated and got its first drink of water. I don't think we have much of a risk for chilling injury. So I think we're sitting pretty good there. Soil temps have dropped about 20 degrees. We're still in the mid 40s, you know, that corn got germinated, feel pretty good there. It's moving slow for a few days. But now the temps seem to, you know, had they've risen a little bit. So stuff is starting to move along as normal again. That kind of leads us back to our opening question. Today it's April 23rd. Does that mean it's time to plant? And I hate to be the agronomist that says it depends, but it really does depend, you know, from spot to spot. You know, you got to look at your four main considerations for when it's time to plant. And those are soil temperature. We want that soil temp to be 50 degrees and have a warming trend. I think we're going to have that in most places this week. And then the next factor to look at is soil moisture. What that forecast is and every operation is different. And you have to consider the number of acres you need to cover with the planting equipment each operation has. So where it depends in my geography is kind of that soil moisture category. That soil moisture is pretty borderline at the moment. And you're probably going to have to look from field to field depending on residue and crop rotation and stuff like that. Some fields are looking dry on top and are pretty wet underneath. So some growers may have a field that's ready and a mile down the road that got another field or a half mile away. Some of the factors I mentioned might keep that field too wet where we should probably bypass that one this week. So depending on how much rain is in the forecast, you know, that planter pass is the most important pass a grower makes throughout the season. It sets up the yield potential for that field. So once we cross that field with the planter, you know, our max yield potential is there. It's every day. Things can happen to take that yield lower. So we want to start right with that planter. Yeah, that forecast is setting up to look favorable and allow a lot of producers to get in the field this week. So as they decide now is the right time, you know, we want to remind them, don't rush and focus on doing it right and getting that planter pass as good as you can. So, you know, we want people to be out checking that planter settings a couple of times in each field minimum. You know, we need to adjust our depth and our down pressure and our closing systems based on the field conditions. So, you know, we're targeting that two inch minimum depth for corn and one and a half inch minimum depth for soybeans. So, we want every seed to be planted at the same depth ideally. That's going to help that consistency in emergence and, you know, every high yield grower we talk to around the country. One of the first things they say is, you know, emergence, emergence, emergence. We got to have that emergence is perfectly even as possible. And that starts with that planter pass trying to make sure every seed is placed at that same depth. So, that helps build that root structure in both corn and soybeans. And that leads into the closing system on planters, too. So, we want to make sure we're getting that sidewall crumbled and getting that good seed to soil contact. You know, one thing I might mention when we think of that perfect planter pass, a lot of people, you know, think about corn first. And, you know, I'd like to remind people that even seeding depth and emergence is important with beans, you know, moving on in my territory. You know, another thing to consider there is your down pressure and some of these wet soils. First of all, we, you know, we don't want to get into these fields too wet, but maybe a majority of the field is fit and we have some very small areas of a field that are on the wetter side yet. And, you know, too much down pressure is going to be a negative. So too much down pressure is going to lead to that sidewall compaction. You know, that's going to affect that root structure. We don't want tomahawk root syndrome on corn, stuff like that. So that's going to lead to season long issues if we're running too much down pressure on some soils that are maybe too wet. So North Central Nebraska, Northeast Nebraska, is it better to start with beans this week and move to corn next week? Well, thanks, Jamie. I think those are important insights that we want all of our producers to remember and take into account. When they do get ready to make that decision to pull the trigger and start their planting for the 2024 season. We have plenty of producers that are off to a good start. And I think here over the next week to 10 days, we're going to have a significant portion of producers in Nebraska, put a large volume of our corn and soybean crop in the ground. You know, a couple other considerations, Jamie, that you and I were talking about here before we started this podcast is as the weather has warmed up here over the last couple of weeks, there's definitely starting to be plenty of early season weed pressure start to show up. Our winter annuals had a very productive year and there's plenty of henbit and other winter annuals starting to show up. So just probably really important to remind our customers and our producers to reiterate the importance of having a strong herbicide program and implementing it early. You know, so if we have some heavy weed pressure from winter annuals and other early season weeds, we need to make sure we have a strong burndown program ready to implement if we have not implemented it already and make sure that whether it's a burndown or we have a fairly clean field already, we have a strong pre-emergent program with multiple modes of action that we're incorporating into our herbicide program is critical and having a successful weed control system. With that, Jamie, any other comments that you'd like to make as we look to round out this week's We're All Ears podcast? One additional thing there, Adam, you know, when you're talking about the soil temps and starting to get some of that stuff, you know, I mentioned earlier, we had some of these spikes. We had that warm February earlier on, and then we had a spike into the 60s with soil temps, you know, a week ago across my geography. So we might see some weeds in this territory, you know, sooner than we're accustomed to seeing. So something for growers to look out for walking a field. We don't see them at the moment, but I think we can probably expect them to show up just a little bit earlier than we're accustomed to. So I want growers to make sure they think about that as, you know, as we move forward. You know, in addition to that, I guess I'd like to thank everybody for listening to the podcast today and remind everybody this is a busy time of year. But take your time, set that crop up for success and enjoy it and have a safe and productive planting season.

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• Apr 19, 2024

  E07: Beyond the Seed: Soybean Yield Potential Keys to Success

  Catch up with Golden Harvest Agronomist, Adam Mayer, as he chats about a few keys to success around soybean yield potential. As a farmer, do you feel like you're maxing out soybean yield potential yet also wonder if there is more you could be doing? Adam mentions factors that you may have not considered around selecting the right variety for your field, maximizing growth stages, and stress mitigation, among others.

  Play Now

  11 min

  Additional Resources

  • Agronomy Guide
  • Early Soybean Planting
  • Factors Influencing Soybean planting Date Response

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, Adam Mayer, Golden Harvest Agronomist, here in Northeast Iowa with Southern Minnesota. You're back with the Beyond the Seeds series as part of our We're All Ears podcast at Golden Harvest. So today, I'd like to hit on an important topic for a lot of growers, as they have hit a ceiling with soybean yields. So I'd like to touch on maybe, how do we take soybeans to the next level, and talk about some high-yield soybeans, and he's a success in that scenario. Just to start out, I would like to give us a baseline of what's going on out in the field, and maybe a few things to expect here coming forward. So we are at April 18th today, and it is currently raining this morning. We've had a good amount of rain across the geography over the last several days here, in the two to three inch range, for the most part across the area. Ground conditions were quite favorable before this rain event, and there was some planting progress in the areas, but not everybody decided to pull the trigger since it was pretty early in the season here, and the forecast was for some cooler temperatures to come. That forecast is currently there with cooler temperatures in the next coming days here, so we will wait for our next planting window and for the soils to warm back up again. Back to our main topic here with high yield in soybeans. To start out, I want to point out again on what makes yield for soybeans. That yield equation is the number of plants times the number of nodes times the number of flowers that we're able to retain and those turn into pods. Then we take that times your number of seeds per pod. And then lastly, what's that seed weight or seed size to get your full yield for that plant or the acre. So I'd like to break these down by parts of that equation. So starting out, the number of plants. So this is really your planting population and then what's that successful stand establishment we get off of that planting population. So remember that I am an agronomist and not necessarily a sales rep. So this part may be a little contentious for some out there, but a lot of times this population is less than you think. You look at some of those high yield growers, some of them are under irrigation, but some of those growers are around 80,000 planting on those best acres. In our geography, I do like the variable rate concept for soybeans. We have plenty of yield history with a lot of our farms. Maybe we should actually use that data that we've accumulated and use it for a management purpose, and this would be a very good one. So we plant lower populations on those highly productive acres and raise that population on the lower productive acres. And this is counterintuitive for what we do with corn, but we like to have more robust and healthier individual plants. And that's what we're providing an environment for by lowering that population on the highly productive areas. It also can help with disease mitigation in those areas as well, which can be more prone to some diseases like white mold with aggressive vegetative growth and encouraging that environment with lower airflow, that sort of thing. So giving each plant a little bit more room in those situations can definitely help. I've actually seen it help with late season plant health with SDS and some premature death as well. So try that out a little bit on your farm and understand what that low end possibly could be for the best management strategy for you. When we look at the number of nodes per plant, this is 100% largely affected by the accumulation of solar radiation during the growing season. So how do we accumulate more solar radiation? We plant early. So you've heard this preached and many have subscribed to this. In a lot of cases, we're planting soybeans in conjunction with or before corn and I think that's definitely one of those keys to success because planting early generally gives you a leg up on the number of nodes. So, you know, anytime we're getting after May 1st for a planting date, we lose roughly, I think it's quarter percent of yield per day after that May 1st timeframe. We definitely need to try to plant accordingly and plant as soon as we can, given that conditions are conducive for planting on soybeans there. The next piece would be around the number of flowers retained. So this is all about stress mitigation and making sure that we have a healthy and happy plant. Soybeans are a plant that is going through the reproductive stages as it is going through the vegetative stages, which is different than, say, corn, where we have vegetative stages up until tasseling, then we switch over to reproductive. So with soybeans, it is very important to keep a low stress environment all the way through the later growing season to help with that pod retention and seed size. So this is all around normal agronomics, so your weed control system obviously has to be in check there. Fungicides, keeping disease at a minimum, that's very important. If we're in a white mold situation, do we need multiple applications of fungicide? Is one going to be enough? Insecticide, making sure that we don't have those piercing suckers taking away from valuable water uptake during the growing season, as well as creating infection sites for disease. There's a lot of things from the pest mitigation standpoint we can do. Then we also need to make sure that we're supplying enough nutrients to that plant. And this nutrient plan starts well before the growing season. We have to make sure that we are fertilizing for what that soybean crop is going to be. Those nutrient requirements are just as important with soybeans. If you look at a 70 bushel soybean crop, it takes nearly 304 pounds of nitrogen to make that crop. 68 pounds of PTO5 phosphate, potassium is around 154 pounds, and sulfur, it takes 24 and a half pounds. Obviously the P and K, we kind of know that soybeans need some, they're going to need more K than P, and nitrogen mostly is going to be supplied by the plant, but there may be some cases that we can help stimulate that. One of those ways is with the application of sulfur. So making sure we have enough sulfur there for the soybeans is going to be pretty critical, especially early in the season. This is for both crops, we need sulfur there early in the season, especially when you have a cool and wet start. A lot of times later in the season, we have enough mineralization to make that sulfur widely available for the plant, but early season, it can be an issue. So with soybeans, the earlier we are planting, the more impactful a sulfur application early in the season is going to be. After we've gotten those macro nutrients correct, then we can start focusing on some other smaller things like micro nutrients, which are a little more difficult to pinpoint a lot of times on what your shortage is. I've also had plenty of growers, well, I've tried foliars before and haven't seen a response. Well, that could be the case. The only time you're going to see a response with foliar micro nutrient packs is if you actually have a deficiency. If you are sufficient in those nutrients, you are absolutely not going to see a response. So a lot of times where you'll see a response with those micronutrients is more in the higher yielding situations where we may be a little out of balance or just not able to uptake enough of those nutrients in a timely fashion. There is also the opportunity to utilize some other things on the market, such as sugars, humics, fulvics, plant growth regulators. There's a lot of these things on the market that can help you get to the next level. I do really like things that help stimulate that microbial population and mycorrhizal population that can help with nutrient release and better nutrient use efficiency and uptake for the plant. So, there's some things that we can do there, but it's hard to pinpoint what is exactly going to work on every operation. So I just say trial and error is probably going to be the best in that realm. The seeds for pod and seed size will also be influenced by mostly late season stress mitigation and ensuring that we are addressing the most limiting factor when it comes to nutrient supplies there. In summary, we want to make sure that we're selecting that Golden Harvest variety for the acre with the attributes that we need to protect the plant season long in that field situation. We want to make sure that we have our soil nutrients with the correct soil pH, starting with those macronutrients and then working on micros when we have a good handle on our macros. We want to work through that stress mitigation, using that good weed management program, pest and disease management. Then we want to work on some of that biology in the soil by enhancing that biology, especially with some food supplies. We can use those humic and fulvic products to help with that nutrient enhancement and uptake. And then play with some plant growth regulators that can also be a useful tool as part of our strategy to get to the next level with soybeans. To close out here, don't be afraid to try new things on the farm and leave a few checks out there. You're not going to get to the next level for not trying some new things. And if you'd like to learn any more about today's topic, you can contact me at adam.mayer at singenta.com. That's M-A-Y-E-R. And that's all for today's episode on Beyond the Seed. Thanks for listening, and have a great spring.

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• Apr 19, 2024

  E06: Focus Friday: Beginning Season Considerations

  Let's join Golden Harvest Agronomist, Charles Scovill, in his update on beginning the crop season in Michigan. He answers questions around when to start planting and what some of his biggest concerns going into the 2024 season are. Check in weekly for the Michigan agronomy update from Charles!

  Play Now

  11 min

  Additional Resources

  • Golden Harvest Agronomy

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist for your Focus Friday here on April the 19th, 2024. So this is episode number one. Focus Friday reports each Friday throughout the growing season. The goal is all about having timely agronomic information that's based on real questions and observations from across Michigan over the past week. And so we try to do that all in about 10 minutes and keep you updated and keep you on the move. So let's get started. Even though we don't have any crop up yet, we do have some crop planted in the ground across the state. And I'm getting two primary questions this last week. The first of which is, when do I start planting? It is the question of April every year. And then the second question has been, what's my biggest concern going into the 2024 season? So we're going to take a few minutes, address both those questions here and get you back on the road. So the first question, planting. Now I did say there are some corn and soybeans out there planted. And for the most part, they're looking pretty good right now. But when I get to talking to folks about, do I plant, when do I start planting? There's basically about five questions that I want to talk about to help them make the decision for their own farm. And truly the first question is, what is your level of risk tolerance? I mean, we are in the ag industry. Farming is all about risk and managing risk. But truly there is greater risk for early as well as late planted fields out there. And so thinking about that level of risk tolerance on your own farm will determine whether you are or not really excited about getting some of that corn and soybeans in the ground early. The second question though is really a lot more serious about whether we truly have success with that early planting. And that is what are your soil conditions? I've done for 26 years now looked at soil temperatures and the magic number of 50 degrees and getting that to germinate and get rolling. But the reality is I would much rather have the perfect soil conditions and be a little bit cold in that soil than to be warm and have a wet planting condition with that seed into. So those soil conditions, we absolutely cannot mud that stuff in. Once we do that, we have created the gift that keeps on giving throughout the entire year. And that is the gift of compaction. And whether that's sidewall compaction, primarily we worried about then, we get those roots narrowed up. They just never are able to get out of that trench to find the moisture nutrients they're gonna need throughout the growing season. So we truly, we've got one chance to get it right in these fields. Pick the right conditions and make sure that soil is ready to go, not too wet, and not creating that type of sidewall compaction out there. So number three, what's the forecast? You gotta look at that five to seven day forecast. We wanna see the temperatures on the rise. We wanna see not a huge pounding rain here in the next couple of days. We realize that, you know, that first drink of water is pretty important. You know, 12 to 24 hours from soybeans to corn, getting that drink of water, we don't want to shock that seed. And so if we can get it in the ground and the temperatures during the day get up to some warmer temperatures, we can get that germination to begin and we can start taking those first drinks of water. But we want to be careful on not having that moving downward in temperature on the forecast, especially corn. It is just so sensitive to cold drink of water. Number four of the five questions that I like to ask is, there's a reality of how many acres do you have to cover and how fast can you get it covered in a day? Because the more acres we have to cover, sometimes the more risk we have to take just to get it all in the ground. And the last question is, have you done your homework? Have you done your pre-work? You know, is tillage, if you're using tillage done, burned down, you know, you made all those planter adjustments. You got a good fertility plan in place. I like to share this story. I still remember it was probably 18 years ago now, but went out to do a corn plot with one of our folks, just a customer that was helping us out. And, you know, we get everything ready, lined up the plot seed. He brings the planter out, drops the planter in the ground. Yeah, I just got it out of the shed here. And so we start taking the covers off the planter boxes. And in the very first row, I look down and there's this white sheet of paper. What's going on here? So I reached down and grab it. And it's a note this farmer put in there when he put the planter away last year. It said, make sure to fix unit number one before planting next year. So a few hours later, we got everything fixed and got started planning the plot. So making sure that everything is in good condition before we get to the field. Beyond that, if we do choose to plant early, there's about three things that I really want to make sure we've got in mind. The first is planting depth. You know, whether it's corn or soybeans, in most soils, I want to see this corn two plus inches in the ground. The reason for that is we want to have uniform temperature. We want to have uniform moisture. And at the end of the day, we're going for uniform emergence. And so it's also going to keep that from coming up a little bit too fast. You know, we think about soybeans and we get those above ground too early. I've seen snow. I've seen frost into early May before. And so we're playing a little bit of a game there. But at the end of the day, check the planter depth as well. You may say you're putting it in two inches and I've had many a farmer say, yeah, I just bought all this brand new equipment. And yeah, it's just the newest and greatest stuff here. I know it's right. And usually we're having that conversation when I'm out there on a service call because the seeds laying on top of the ground are not nearly as deep as they thought they had placed it. So number two is make sure you have some patience. You know, it takes 100 to 120 growing degree day units for this stuff to emerge. You know, when we're 50, 60 degrees, we're not picking up many heat units a day. So it's going to take more time in the ground. And so with that, we better make sure for both corn and beans, we've got a really good seed treatment on those early plantings just to ward off that disease and those insects that are going to have just more days to attack that early planted crop. And the third question about planting early is corn or beans? Which one do I plant first? And everything lately has been talking about soybeans first. But why is that? Because we talk, there is risk of those freezing off if they come above ground. And that's the growing point on those soybeans. But soybeans are a legume. They're built to handle cold. You think even about alfalfa as a legume, we plant that early. Just they do well and they're not as finicky. On the corn side, by definition, corn is a warm season grass. A warm season grass. So, yeah, we could frost that corn off even up to V3, V4 stages. But corn is the type of crop that never wants a bad day. And so if we got to wait on one, corn certainly is the better, because we can get it in and get it right back out of the ground with some warmer soils, that crop just continues to thrive. So question number two, though, that I've been getting, we talked about here is what is my biggest concern as we come into this 2024 planting and growing season? And I think back to the fact that we have had a really warm winter. And so there's a couple of things that just have me concerned. And the biggest part is under soil structure. Without that freeze thaw cycle, we didn't get that natural breakup of the soils. So the soils are a little tighter than usual. And, you know, fall harvest was tough on us. We had some fall ruts out there that we did everything we could, but we had to get the crop out of the field. And getting that out of the field caused us to do things that we normally wouldn't have done. Now, my fear, we're going to take a tillage tool over the top of that. We're going to level that field right off. It's going to look nice. The reality is the compaction is still there. When we go to pull up nutrients later in the season, we're going to see the remnants of that. And we just haven't had the soil conditions in many cases to get those ruts out of that soil. So be aware of that and try to manage through that. Also, when we do have a warmer winter, we got the greater potential of overwintering insects and possibly some disease. So I think of the early season grubs and seed corn maggots and wireworms, we're already getting reports of alfalfa weevil coming in from Indiana. And so if we're in the alfalfa world, we need to be scouting right now to look for those and get those treated. And certainly later on, we're going to see black cutworms wound from the south. We're going to see corn rootworm right here in our soils already where those eggs were laid last fall. And the emergence of western bean cutworms later on in the season certainly can be one of those additional risks. So as we're wrapping up here today, my thought is just we need to be vigilant this year. We really need to have a good scouting plan for those fields and then be willing to respond to what we find when we walk those fields. So again, this is Charles Scovill, your Golden Harvest Agronomist, with your first version of the 24 Focus Friday podcast. Have a great week.

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• Apr 15, 2024

  E05: Cultivating Success: Continuous Corn Management

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Andrew Rupe, discusses a handful of main points of emphasis around continuous corn management. Residue management, carbon penalty, corn pest management including corn rootworm (CRW) and disease management, and fertility management. These are important strategies to consider when growing corn on corn.

  Play Now

  12 min

  Additional Resources

  • Agronomy Guide
  • Managing Continuous Corn Yield Penalty

  Episode Transcript

  Hello, folks, thanks for tuning in to the We're All Ears podcast. My name is Andrew Rupe, and this sub-series within the podcast is called Cultivating Success. And today's topic that I'm going to be covering is continuous corn management. How do we best manage and what are our points of emphasis whenever we're looking at growing multiple years of corn on the same field? So first, I just wanted to give a little bit of a status update before we get into this topic. I'm recording this podcast on Friday, April 12th, and within East Central Iowa, planting has started. We are probably looking at somewhere around 15 to 20 percent of growers have gotten their planters out of the field and started planting some crop in my area. We've had some great weather this weekend that we're running into. We're looking at highs in the upper 70s to low 80s. We may have a little bit of some rain chances middle of next week and some cool down, but we're getting a really nice start to planting in my geography. So now let's talk about our topic for today, continuous corn management. And when I think about continuous corn management, I really think of five main points of emphasis for this topic. And I'll probably go through these points of emphasis not necessarily on a priority stage, but a little bit more chronologically, a little bit more, you know, what do we need to address first in the calendar, I would say, because for some of these topics, they may be more important in your area. And some of these points of emphasis may be a little bit less important if you're in a little different geography. Let's start out with our first point of emphasis. First thing we really need to think about whenever we think about continuous corn management is residue management. How do we size that residue into some smaller pieces so that we can get, one, a little bit better breakdown of that residue and that trash, but also actually getting that residue moved out of the way of our coming year's corn crop. When I think of residue management, I'm thinking about things like chopping corn heads on our combine. I'm thinking about what your tillage tool looks like that effectively sizes that residue. And then maybe what is your tillage tool that actually helps to maybe bury some of that residue as well. So those are some things to kind of consider. You know, whenever we think about sizing residue, why are we sizing residue? Well, we're just creating more surface area for the microbes to actually adhere to and then actually start to break down that residue. And then whenever it comes to residue management ahead of the planter, we're really focusing on cleaning that furrow and making sure that that furrow is basically just dirt and there's not a lot of rash and residue there that might impact the emergence of our crop. Basically, if we get stalks or trash or anything like that is pinned next to our seed that we plant, then that can cause some differences in water uptake and imbubition, and whenever that happens, that can create unevenness in our emergence. And if there's anything that many of our higher yield or higher management growers have experiences that if you are really looking for a high yielding corn crop, you have to get uniform even emergence in the springtime. So that's point of emphasis number one. Number two, which is a little bit related to this is carbon penalty. We've kind of seen this more and more each spring, especially as we start to push our planting date a little bit earlier, especially in the more recent years. We do see a little bit of a slower breakdown of that carbon in our fields, especially if we're in a corn on corn situation, because a lot of that corn residue from last year's crop just has a lot of carbon in it. Well, what does that carbon do? That carbon can tie up some of the nitrogen in the currently growing corn crop. So a lot of times what we'll see is corn plants, young little V2, V3 corn plants that are just not that deep green color. They're more of a pale green or yellowish color. Why is that? Part of that could be access to nutrients, but a big part of that could be that there's just a lot of carbon on the surface and we need that carbon to break down. We need to get that carbon and nitrogen ratio down so that we can allow that plant to have a little bit more access to nitrogen. So some ways to overcome this carbon penalty is some surface applications of nitrogen. So that may be UAN in a weed and feed application or some urea put down early or some planter applied fertility that gives it a little bit of a nitrogen source early. So those are some ways to maybe overcome some of that carbon penalty in the crop early in the season. All right, number three is corn rootworm management. And in my geography, corn rootworm management is really top of mind whenever it comes to a continuous corn grower. We have pretty high pressure in Iowa as well as other areas of the corn belt. So managing corn rootworm is really what a lot of growers are focused on whenever they're in this type of management situation. So we know that there are multiple different traits available on the marketplace that can help to manage corn rootworm populations. We know that there are also insecticide options that are available, granular insecticides, liquid insecticides. So there's a couple different tools in our tool belt for corn rootworm management. Another piece is not really necessarily management of this year's corn crop, but maybe for future corn on corn situations. And that would be a foliar insecticide used maybe at the time of tassel or a little bit after tassel to help them manage some adult populations of corn rootworm. So whenever it comes to corn rootworm management, we really like a somewhat of a layered approach to this, especially if you're experiencing some pressure with corn rootworm. So we may look at really using both traits, as well as a planter applied insecticide for our corn rootworm management. So we're kind of layering that approach, giving those bugs maybe a couple different doses of insecticide treatment on it to get more of a kill and more of an efficacious approach to managing these populations. All right, so let's talk about point of emphasis number four, and that is fertility management. Now, whenever it comes to fertility management, it's just simply, have we supplied enough fertilizer to the crop to maintain our yield goals that we're looking at? For example, a 200 bushel corn crop, if we were to achieve that last year, and we're thinking about going to a corn on corn situation, we would have removed in simply just the grain, 140 pounds of nitrogen from the soil, 70 pounds of P2O5 phosphate, and 50 pounds of K2O potassium, as well as around 16 to 18 pounds of sulfur from the grain. So making sure that we have appropriately high levels in our soil tests, as well as supplying the appropriate amount of fertilizer to feed that crop. And remembering that also, even if we supply that much fertilizer, it may take some time for that fertilizer to break down based on what the weather conditions are like. Sometimes it may take almost an entire year for that to break down. So we may look at increasing some of those rates in a corn on corn situation, just so that whatever percentage of breakdown we get, we make sure that we actually get that for that crop for this growing season. And our last point of emphasis that I want to hit on is disease management. When I think of disease management, I'm thinking of managing the big three diseases within my geography that can overwinter in the soil. And anytime we have a disease that its inoculum is overwintering in the soil, I'm really thinking about Northern Corn Leaf Light, Gray Leaf Spot and Tarr Spot. Those are diseases that are common in my geography and are overwintered in the ground. And anytime that we have a disease that overwinter in the ground, if we're in a corn on corn situation, the potential load of that inoculum is much, much higher than if we're in a rotated situation. So how do we manage those diseases? Well, there's really two steps that we can imply that can manage those diseases. Number one is host management practices, such as picking a hybrid that has high levels of resistance to those diseases. Any seed company will show you ratings based upon what they see for how well that genetic package is able to resist those diseases. It's the same for Golden Harvest as well as many other seed companies. So look up those ones if you're in a corn on corn situation and making sure you're picking the hybrid that has a good in-host tolerance to those diseases. The other piece would be fungicide utilization. So if you're in a corn on corn situation, you should strongly be considering using a fungicide for that crop as well. It's going to help to basically it's going to provide a layer protection on those leaves so we don't get that foliar disease, get a strong foothold and move its way up the canopy more rapidly late in the season. So that's just a little bit of some bullet points for us to consider if we're in a continuous corn management situation. So our points of emphasis again, we're looking at residue management. First and foremost, we've got to get that residue kind of sized and appropriate so that we can plant our crop. Carbon penalty. How do we maybe put down some fertility up front ahead of the planter or with the planter so that we overcome that carbon penalty with that corn crop residue? Corn rootworm management, so making sure that we've got a trait that's effective against corn rootworms and then maybe also an insecticide put down at the time of planting so that we can effectively manage those populations. Fertility management, making sure that we've got the appropriate amount of fertility out there either before we plant or just after we plant. And then the last piece is disease management. And that could take place before we plant as well for what genetics we're going to put out there and then also in season whenever we manage it with a fungicide application. I appreciate you all tuning in to this week's episode of We're All Ears. If you have any questions around this topic, please feel free to reach out to your local Golden Harvest Seed Advisor, sales rep, agronomist or GHX specialist. We'll catch you next time.

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• Apr 12, 2024

  E04: Beyond the Seed: Planting Corn or Soybeans First? And Cover Crop Termination

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Adam Mayer, joins us to talk about which crop to plant first, corn or soybeans? He discusses the factors that go into making this decision and the impact it can have in your farming operation. Adam also sets some reminders around cover crop termination timing.

  Play Now

  12 min

  Additional Resources

  • Agronomy Guide
  • Cover Crop Termination Methods In Soybeans
  • Rye Cover Crop

  Episode Transcript

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• Apr 09, 2024

  E3: Cultivating Success: Early N Use in Corn and Setting the Planter

  Listen in to Golden Harvest Agronomist, Andrew Rupe, as he discusses what is going on in Eastern Iowa as well as some things to consider when planting this spring. He visits the topics of early nitrogen application and use in corn along with planting depth and downforce.

  Play Now

  11:50 min

  Additional Resources

  • Agronomy Guide
  • Characterzing Hybirds For Response To Incremental Zone

  Episode Transcript

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• Apr 05, 2024

  E2: Kernels of Agronomy: What to Expect Following a Warm Winter

  Golden Harvest Agronomist, Wayde Looker, sets the stage for some things you might see in your fields this year due to a warmer than average winter. Wayde discusses frogeye leaf spot, bean leaf beetle, and Mexican bean beetle in soybeans as well as some management considerations for them

  Play Now

  7 min

  Additional Resources

  • Frogeye leaf spot soybean
  • Bean leaf beetle soybeans

  Episode Transcript

  Hello and welcome to episode two of the kernels of Agronomy podcast here with Wade Looker. Again, I am the agronomist for Golden Harvest covering Ohio and the East. Today we have another exciting show for you. So the first thing that we covered in episode one was the toxin study from Ohio State University and the risks and rewards of planting early. If those interest you, then you can go back to episode one and check it out. Today we are going to talk about all this warm weather that we've been having this winter. We've had a lot of just really beautiful days over the course of the winter with really very little snow. I've got three young kids and they've been very disappointed that so far this year they've only been able to make one snowman. It is April 4. As I record this, I think that the likelihood of them getting another snowman day is probably pretty unlikely. With that, let's dive into it. To begin with, I think a lot of folks have realized and recognized that this has been a really abnormally warm winter. To put that in perspective, let's look at the month of February alone. If you look at the highs and lows across the state of Ohio at various points in Ohio, you're looking at a month that was six to nine degrees warmer than average. We're really looking at quite remarkably high temperature levels in relation to what is normal, really, really warm overall temperatures here this winter. How is that poise to affect our crop here in 2024? Well, there's a few different things to look at. First is going to be diseases. Fortunately, there's not a lot of corn diseases that are susceptible to winter kills. A lot of the corn diseases that we would normally have are going to have again the upcoming season. There is one soybean disease of particular interests and that's going to be froggy. Leaf spot, froggy does an excellent job of overwintering during warm conditions. It's a southern disease, typically here in Ohio and the rest of our trade area here. We see it later on into the summer, as those southerly winds blow up from the south, it'll bring the frogeye fungus with it. Since we've had such a warm winter, it's probably a pretty high degree of likelihood that we're going to have brag guide that survived the winter on that soybean residue. What that means is if we are going to have a field that we are no tailing soybeans back into soybean stubble, that's probably going to be the very first place that we need to look for frog eye. This year we're going to see more of an earlier onset of frog eye. It's very likely that it'll also be more severe. Usually we're looking at those three or five fungicide applications to take care of frog eye this year. Especially again, if we are no tilling beans into soybeans, stubble, we really need to be paying close attention to those fields. Again, we're likely to see earlier onset and more severe onset because that disease is already present and we're not relying on it blowing up from the south. Keep that in mind if you're able to do some tillage that would help to bury that residue and bury that frog guy that overwintered. But again, if we're doing soybeans on soybeans, a pretty high degree of likelihood that frog guy will have overwintered there. That takes care of the diseases to look out for. Next, we have a couple of insects. The first is going to be one that I think most people have probably seen before and that's going to be bean leaf beetle. Bean leaf beetle can come in a variety of colors, but the one really determining identifiable characteristic of it is it's got that identifiable black triangle right behind its head. If you see an insect in your beans, that's defoliating them and it has that black triangle behind its head, whether it's red or yellow or something like that. Very high degree of likelihood, that is a bean leaf beetle. With the fact that we had such a warm winter, we did not winter kill the quantity of bean leaf beetle that we normally do. They are fairly susceptible to winter kill when we have temperatures that get quite cold. Without that cold weather this year, they likely found some places to live in plant residue, weeds, leaves along the edges of fields, stuff like that. I would certainly be ready to start scouting for those looking for those mid May to early June when they start feeding. Again, pretty strong likelihood that we're going to see heavier bean leaf beetle pressure earlier on this year than in years past. At the point before our soybeans start to flower before bloom, the current economic threshold on that is 40% defoliation. If you go out there and it looks like around 40% of that leaf has been eaten off, You might want to think about doing an insecticide application to control being leaf beetle. Now, the last insect that we're going to talk about is the Mexican bean beetle. This one's probably not one that a whole lot of folks in my listening audience have encountered before. However, we have seen it across central Ohio before in the past. It's one to keep on the back burner, keep your eye out for as we move forward. It's going to look a little bit like a lady bug. It'll have that same shell with black spots on it, so it'll look a little bit like a lady bug. This is another one that usually winter kills if we have some cold temperatures. And since we have an absence of cold temperatures, again way more likely that we're going to see some of that this year. Thresholds are also going to be the same. It's no different than being leaf beetle in terms of how it feeds. When you look at that leaf area before bloom, if you see about 40% of that that has been defoliated or eaten off, then it's time to make an insecticide application. That's the quick rundown of what's happening in agronomy here this week. To give you a recap, there's really three things that we need to be looking for since we had such a warm winter. The first is froggy leaf spot because that overwintered, we're probably going to see earlier onset and more severe onset. Have your fungicides ready to go look first in any fields that were soybeans, Double that we know tilled soybeans into second is going to be bean leaf beetle. Because we had a very mild winter, we did not get the winter kill that we normally do. Start looking for heavy or increased bean leaf beetle pressure there in mid May to early June. And then look for Mexican bean beetle. And you're going to see that very same similar type of defoliation that you will both bean leaf beetle. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out at email at Wade. Dot look at Sena.com Thank you so much for listening to episode two and we'll see you again at the next episode.

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• Apr 02, 2024

  E01: A Harvest Homage: Lending Our Ears to Farmer Questions

  Join Golden Harvest Agronomist, Wayde Looker, as he talks about a corn hybrid vomitoxin tolerance study done by The Ohio State University in 2023, as well as his approach to early planting. Find the study by OSU on their C.O.R.N. Newsletter (2024-06)

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  14 min

  Additional Resources

  • Corn News letter

  Episode Transcript

  Hello and welcome to the first episode of Colonels of Agronomy. I am your host, Wade Looker. I am the agronomist for Golden Harvest that is charged with servicing Ohio and the East Coast. The purpose of this podcast is to provide timely updates about relevant agricultural topics throughout the growing season, Will be accessible through the Spotify app and all other major podcast outlets. I'll also be sending out some links to get you guys started and used to finding where you need to go. Today's discussion, we're going to feature two very important topics. First, I'm going to cover the results of the recent Ohio State University vomitoxin study. Really, really impactful information there for not only golden harvest customers, but also all farmers in Ohio in general. Then second, I'm going to talk about early planting and best management tactics for early planting and how to make it work the best. As the calendar gets ready to slip into April, this will be something that becomes more and more timely. Stay tuned. I hope you enjoy the first episode and we'll begin now. The first thing that I really wanted to cover here today was this very exciting information that just came out of Ohio State University. If you haven't heard, they did a really great vomitoxin study where they evaluated various hybrids across different companies to see which ones had the best tolerance to vomatoxin. I thought I'd go through a little bit of that today. First of all, I just want to give a big thank you to the Ohio Corn and Wheat Board for funding the project. This is something that's going to be really impactful for Ohio's growers, not just this year, but in the future. Very much. I want to thank them to give a little bit of background on the study. I was at an event in central Ohio last year where a large hog operation hosted Doctor Pierce Paul from Ohio State to come speak about vomit toxin. Doctor Pierce Paul is the plant pathologist for the corn side of things for Ohio State University. And he came and gave a fantastic lecture about all things vomitoxin, how to help mitigate the amount of pressure that we see what to do to help reduce vomitoxin loads and stuff like that. One of the first things that he mentioned was the importance of hybrid tolerance. And he really stressed that growers should plant hybrids that have good tolerance to vomitoxin. The problem with that that we saw was nobody really had a great idea of what hybrids were good on Vomitoxin. You know, we had done some trialing the previous year or two and gathered some evidence on which hybrids within our own lineup perform better than others. So we kind of went back to them and said, hey, this is great advice, you should be planting hybrids that have good tolerance to vomitoxin. The problem with that is until we can get good hard evidence on which ones truly are better than others, it's going to be really hard to convey that to growers. To their credit, they took that feedback and they developed a protocol and an excellent study to really evaluate what hybrids perform better than others. This has been very key for our own messaging here with Golden Harvest. That way I know which hybrids do better in comparison to one another within our own lineup. But probably the most impactful thing is to see how different brands stack up to one another. So this was something that was offered, the study was offered to all seed companies and it was actually free of charge. Again, thank you to Ohio Corn and Wheat Board for that. This was free of charge and we were able to enter as many hybrids as we wanted. I essentially entered all of the different hybrids within our entire lineup. I even went up and collaborated with Charles Scoville up in Michigan and got some of the 90 day stuff to trial as well. So we really wanted to get a really good look at it. My whole approach on this is I would rather Ohio State tell me that a hybrid struggles on vamatoxin than have a grower. Tell me that one of our hybrids struggles on vamatoxin. Even if we do wind up getting some results that are negative in regards to a specific hybrid, we still need to know that I was really pleased with the results. The results came out in March. Here you've probably seen either marketing materials from myself, may have seen the article in the newsletter or the actual publication itself from Ohio State or even in digital de with Domino of the Ohio Agnet. He released that shortly after as well. This is something that, again, has been a huge deal for Ohio's customers. It's something that we see almost every year now. And it's something that really impacts most of Ohio's growers in one way or another. Again, really pleased to see that. Let's take a look at some of the actual data that came out. I entered 16 of our most popular hybrids. There were 80 different hybrids in total that were entered. Of those 16, I had ten different hybrids that averaged less than one part per million Don or vamatxin. Super impressive numbers there. Where of the 16 that I entered, ten of them averaged less than one part per million. I should note that this is not just one location. They did this at three different locations. At South Charleston, Ohio, just west of Columbus, near Busiris, Ohio, north of Columbus, and near Worcester, up there, northeast of Columbus. Of those three different locations, there were a couple different variations within those. At Busirist, the Worcester location, they did both natural vomatoxin pressure, but then they also inoculated plots to ensure that there would be vomitoxin pressure. When you take into account the three locations and then the two different studies at two of the locations, That adds up to five total site years. 13 of the 16 different hybrids that I entered finished with better than average Don levels or vomatoxin levels at all five of those site years, really exciting results there. Another really exciting point is this, Eight of the 16 hybrids that I entered, half of the hybrids that I entered had one of the sites come back with zero detectable vomaitoxin. Half of the hybrids that I entered wound up having zero vomaitoxin at sites in locations that are specifically designed to have Vom toxin. Really, really exciting stuff there. Overall, it was really nice to see that the anecdotal evidence, the stories, the feedback that we've gotten from our growers really translated into the scientific approach that Ohio State University did. This is something that they are going to continue to do. We will be doing this again this year on the grain side of things. And they're actually launching a silage piece of this as well. Look for that probably again, next winter, it just takes a while to collect all the samples, to get everything sent out and analyzed. I would venture to say that there will be more companies that participate in this, given the interest that this has garnered. And we will once again be submitting just to ensure that we have the best possible information in front of us when we're making placement decisions and trying to do what's right by our farmers. So if you have any other further questions about the Va toxin study, please reach out and I'd be happy to help you. Moving on to our second topic, early planting. It is cold and rainy out there today. However, the calendar is about to turn to the beginning of April. Once we get into April, there will likely be planting window there in early April. Guys are going to start to get itchy about whining to get out, get some early crops in the ground. Let's take a few minutes to talk about that first. My own personal preference is planting beans early over corn. I recognize that many folks like to get corn in the ground first, and that planting beans before corn can almost feel a little odd to some growers. However, this has been a trend in agriculture for the past few years. Honestly, we've seen really good results for it. I'll dive into why I like planting beans early versus corn. But the first thing that I want to note, and this is paramount, do not plant any crop if the field conditions are not fit. Planting into cold soil is one thing. Planting into cold and wet soil that does become a recipe for disaster and for replants later on. If you are planning on going out, please make sure that the ground is fit first, otherwise you're probably not going to see the desired results that you're looking for. Back to why I like beans going in the ground early versus corn. As we know, uniform emergence is vitally important to corn yield. Each one of those plants, we want to have them emerge within the exact same 24 hour period, if possible. And it's just difficult to achieve that level of uniformity with emergence when your corn might be sitting there for three weeks before it comes out of the ground. We really want to make sure that corn is popping up all at the same time to ensure that uniformity and that top end yield potential there. That's why I like waiting a little bit longer to let the soil warm up to plant corn so that we can get that more uniform emergence. Another key factor to consider is no till ground versus conventional till ground. Conventional till ground actually handles early planting better because it warms up quicker in the spring. That dark soil does an excellent job of soaking up that radiant heat from the sun, that little microclimate right next to the soil and in the soil actually stays a little bit warmer versus no till situations. I know it can be a little bit counterintuitive because you think, well, that residue on top of the ground is going to act as insulation and keep that ground warmer. Which really doesn't align with the reality of the situation. That radiant sunlight really does warm that soil up. And it does an excellent job of helping with emergence on those early planting crops. When you think about soybeans, in particular, soybeans, they very much are a factory that takes sunlight and converts it into grain. The whole thought process of planting beans early is to have that window of time that factory open as long as possible. By planting beans early, it gives us more time for branching. Branching does play a pretty important factor in yield. The more branches you have, that's more areas, more spots on that plan for flowers to set. The more flowers you have, the more pod sets you have the potential to have. The more pods, the more seed, the more seed, the more yield. The amount of branching really does play an important role in it. By planting early, it gives us more time in that vegetative stage, more branches. It also can accelerate when those beans go into the reproductive stage. Another important factor with that is our weather pattern. Often that late July into August timeframe, it can get hot and dry, and we know that beans like to have water. If we can move those reproductive stages earlier into July, or maybe even into June, we're able to get that very important reproductive phase of that plant's life cycle when usually weather is a little bit better. It also allows us to plant earlier RM soybeans too. If we were wanting to plant some earlier RM beans, maybe we like the variety and the way it works within our soil. You can have the flexibility to plant an early bean early because it extends that growing season into a normal length of time. Versus planting an early season being real late, where you just shorten that growth season so short that you're unable to really maximize the yield on it. One concern you may have is if I plant really early, do I need to plant more plants per acre because I'm more likely to lose stand? That's a really interesting thing about planting early because you're promoting more branching. You really don't need to add any plants out there, because each individual plant is going to wind up being more productive because of the increased branching that you see with it. Therefore, if you do wind up with a reduced stand, it's less concerning with early planet crops than it is later planet crops. For example, if I have a stand of 60,000 soybeans out there that was planted April 10, that's way less concerning to me than a stand of 60,000 beans that are planted there in June 10. That's a much, much different situation that we're talking about in terms of replanting. Thanks so much for tuning into the first episode of Kernels of Agronomy here with Wade Looker. Really excited to have you. And I hope that you would enjoy this first episode and tune into subsequent episodes here in the future as a wrap up. Just want to say thanks to the Ohio Corn and Wheat Board for funding the Vomitoxin study. Then lastly, if you are planning on doing some early planting, I really like the idea. I would focus on soybeans first and I would focus on fields that are fit and dry. I would also focus on fields that are conventionally tilled versus no till situations. If you have any questions, you can go ahead and e mail me at Wade dot looker at Sena.com way, spellyd.lrena.com or you can reach out to me by phone as well. With that, thanks so much for tuning in to the first episode. And we'll catch you again next time.

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