Pioneer Agronomist: Hold Off on Planting If You Can


If you have an iPhone, how far up that favorites list is your agronomist this time of year compared to your spouse or children? It’s okay…this time of year gets tricky as farmers across Indiana are finding it more and more difficult to answer the question of whether or not they should plant.
“If you have the luxury of not going the next couple of days, that’s kind of what I’m recommending,” says agronomist Brian Early who covers North Central Indiana for Pioneer. He told Hoosier Ag Today he had already received around a dozen calls early Monday morning from farmers.
“It’d be nice to see a little warmer temperatures to not have that chilling injury that seedlings can get. So, if there’s any way you can wait a couple days and find something else to do a couple days, that’s kind of been my recommendation for everybody.”
Early didn’t say “no” to those farmers, he just points out what you’re up against.
“Planting today, you’re not going to accumulate many heat units over the next week, week and a half. So really, it’s just getting some more acres in the ground, which for some people, they have to. They’ve got to go when they’ve got to go.”
From a yield standpoint, Early says you’re not missing out on any by waiting a while. You can simply look at last year as an example.
“Especially on corn. You just don’t see that yield penalty that a lot of the literature would say that you do. Soybeans, I would say they’re such a crop that is sensitive to light that we do see that penalty with beans. So, if you have to push one crop, I’d definitely choose beans over corn. But with corn, that window is still wide open. We’ve had years where we planted most everything the last week or two of May, even that first week of June, and we still have some really good yields if the conditions throughout the summer are good.”
If you have questions for your Pioneer field agronomist, visit pioneer.com/FINDMYREP for that contact info. Then you can plug it into your iPhone favorites.

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