The new episode in the Walking Through the Growing Season video series is now live and in it we take a look at corn and soybean crops on the Kelly farm in western Howard County, not far from Kokomo, Indiana. With harvest fast approaching, the video with Specialty Hybrids offers tips on what you can still do with crops so far along in the growth stage.
Agronomist Tom Manney says one thing you want to avoid is getting caught by surprise.
“It’s important to get out and inspect fields and that way you know what you’re going to be looking into as that combine pulls up to the field,” Manney says in the HAT video. “So, if you have potential issues or on the other side if you have a really good looking crop where that field caught a lot of rains, you can use that information to kind of align maybe if you got a really good looking field of corn, you’re going to need some more trucks to help get that grain out of the field so you can prioritize a little more help when you get on fields like that.”
Scouting now includes a test for standability of the crop, and Jeremy Kelly, Competitive Edge Ag and Specialty Hybrids dealer explains that also helps set harvest priorities.
“You want to have good standability,” Kelly explains. “If the plant goes down, it’s obviously going to slow down harvest. It’ll be harder to pick up the ears off the ground. All in all, you just want to have good standing corn so you can go through and shell it and not have any harvest issues and delays.”
Kelly says use the simple push test.
“You can take a plant and you can shove it over to the next row and make sure that it does not snap or that it doesn’t bend down at the root. Just make sure it springs back and has some good stock strength that way.”
In the video Manney and Daniel Stauffer from Specialty Hybrids also talk about late season disease concerns.