Some stormy weather has rocked parts of northern Indiana this week, even flattening some field crops. Along with the storms has come enough rain that Rob Schuman is now asking for no more, at least for a while, not a common request during August. Schuman is a local field sales representative for Specialty Hybrids with customers between Ft. Wayne and Warsaw and on into southern Michigan.
“Yeah we always say July rain makes corn and August rain makes soybeans, so we felt like we were in really good shape coming into the month of August and felt like probably 2 or 3 decent rains would finish the soybean crop in a good direction, and we’ve had enough moisture here in the first 2 weeks or so of August, I mean obviously you never want to hardly turn one away but if we could go 10 days or 2 weeks we’d be just fine.”
One report of rain we received was 4.5 inches in less than a 24-hour period south of Warsaw, 2 inches of that coming in just 30 minutes Wednesday.
And as for disease in fields this summer, “we know we have the ideal environment to create it, so it’s just a matter of time.”
Schuman says it has been a very busy year of applying fungicides, but tar spot is showing up.
“I have heard a lot of folks say that it’s on the fringes of what I would consider my main area,” he told HAT. “I haven’t seen it right in my backyard yet, but we’ve seen a lot of airplanes in the air trying to keep it out. With the heat and the moisture you’re always creating an ideal environment for things like gray leaf spot, northern corn leaf blight, in soybeans frogeye leaf spot, Septoria brown spot we saw earlier on quite a bit in soybeans, so it’s kind of an of all the above situation.”
Schuman encourages growers to be thinking and planning for next season as they head for this year’s harvest. And one thing to key on is the rise in input prices.
“Not so much from a seed perspective but fertilizer, chemicals, fuel, things like that, I think we’re all gonna see substantial increases. I had a guy send me some fertilizer prices this morning and they’re significantly higher than what you could have bought it for even back in the spring of this year.”
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