If you are among those hit by rains that halted planting operations, use the downtime to walk fields and see if you are happy with your results so far. Pioneer Southeast Indiana agronomist Jason Geis recommends checking your planting depth, spacing and closure before you resume planting.
“We can cover a lot of acres in one day anymore,” he explained. “Because of that we can also have issues on a lot of acres in one day, so it’s not uncommon to get a call in the spring and find one row that’s maybe stunted or not emerging as well. So maybe we broke a spring or something like that or didn’t have the right closing wheel pressure. Maybe one of our 2×2 row starter rows was worn or got bent and we put fertilizer closer to the road and the fertilizer burned those roots. So just take the time to walk around the planter and make sure that you’re getting good seed contact. Make sure nothing looks out of the norm.”
Geis is frequently asked if soybean seed treatments are still an important tool even as temperatures warm up. His answer is yes, stick with the treated seed.
“There’s a handful of those diseases that actually like warmer soils as well, so phytophthora is one that likes warm, wet soils to infect the plant, and fusarium is another seedling disease that can infect in a wide range of soil conditions. Then if we’re talking about nematodes, those can infect soybeans and the damage is typically worse when it’s hot and dry. So just because it’s getting later, things are emerging quicker, there is still certainly plenty of opportunity for our stands to get impacted by seedling diseases.”
Pioneer’s new insecticide seed treatment called Lumiderm is very good at treating seed corn maggot. That could be important this year.
Hear more from Pioneer’s Jason Geis in the full HAT interview below and get in touch with your Pioneer agronomist by visiting pioneer.com/findmyrep.
