In Monday’s USDA Crop Progress Report, Indiana corn is rated 47% good-to-excellent, a 1 point drop from the previous week.
“A lot of corn that looked like pineapple out there and was struggling. It was rolling at 9 in the morning and was rolling for consecutive days,” says Purdue Extension Corn Specialist Dan Quinn on the latest Purdue Crop Chat Podcast, found now below.
“We talk about ear size determination in corn and when we roll those leaves for a long period of time, it just limits the amount of CO2 the plant can uptake and it just hinders photosynthesis. We hinder photosynthesis, it’s going to hinder how much biomass it produces, how much leaf area we have, and that can hurt us throughout the rest of the season.”
Quinn says he’s beginning to see nitrogen deficiencies in corn. While many farmers across the state got the rain they needed here over the past week, that certainly wasn’t the case for everyone. He expects some of that will clear up for those that did get rain but will continue to be a struggle for those that didn’t.
“We had plots out on the farm here at Purdue where we had nitrogen deficiencies show up. We were walking those fields kind of scratching our heads, ‘Why is a nitrogen deficiency showing up? We have 200+ pounds of nitrogen on this plot.’ And it’s just that we don’t have the adequate root growth, we don’t have the moisture to uptake those nutrients. So, we’re starting to see that nitrogen deficiency.
Quinn says that if it stays dry, it’s not like you can just pull out your high sprayer and put on more nitrogen.
“If we don’t have moisture there, we’re not going to uptake that nitrogen…You know, this rain helps but I expect we did lose some yield.”
Hear much more from Quinn in the Purdue Crop Chat Podcast, available now wherever you listen to podcasts.