One veteran agronomist says at times the Indiana corn crop all across the central region looked like the prettiest crop he had ever seen. But Indiana-based DEKALB technical agronomist Jason Holman said corn this year wasn’t without it’s challenges, including early season seedling diseases and then drought and heat.
“We’ve had some high temperature during the day and high temperature at night in excess of 30 days throughout the summer,” he told HAT. “That really did have an effect on pollination and grain fill in corn. So we’ve seen some challenges with that with tip back, kernel depth, things like that. Yields have been pretty good. I’ve heard some very good yields and I’ve heard some disappointing yields. In addition to that we’ve seen a lot of standability issues throughout the central part of the state, and a lot of that comes back to crown rot. I travel quite a bit around the state of Indiana and we’ve seen a little bit of anthracnose, but fusarium crown rot has been probably the biggest culprit of stalk diseases and stalk standability late season.”
Holman says as you prepare for 2017, focus on weed control. And make sure you have soil sampling done.
“There’s a lot of waterhemp across the state so we need to develop an action plan and figure out what chemicals we’re going to use. Work with your ag-chem retailer on that to develop a plan, because the last thing we want to do is to continue to have to fight this. We need to get after it, use multiple modes of action, use residuals.”
On the soil sample front Holman added, “We’ve had some really good corn and we’ve had some not so good corn across the state. Be aware that you are going to be pulling some more nutrients out of the soil in these higher yielding fields, so a really good, accurate soil test is going to help you develop a great fertility plan moving forward into ’17.”
Hear more comments from Jason Holman:jason-holman-2016-wrap