Corn and soybean update from Warren County
During a crop check this week near Attica in Warren County, stands were rated very good by agronomist Bill Mullen. There were almost no problems to be found except for a soybean field with patches of yellowing on the plant leaves, starting from the outside and working in. The director of agronomic services for Seed Consultants explained the plants were showing potash deficiency.
“That’s not to say in this field the customer doesn’t have enough potash. There’s something that affected the plant from taking it up. I think early on the roots weren’t as developed here. You can get a sandy loam, and the customer said there are some of those areas, or compaction, something there that just prevented those plants from taking it up.”
So should the farmer make a move to treat that field?
“Individuals when they see a symptom like this will say, hey you need to take potash and treat it as a foliar spray over the top of your field. No you don’t,” says Mullen. “You just have to walk in the field and look and see issues like this, and as you can see it’s not in the whole field. It’s just in these spots here.”
New growth on those same soybean plants is nice and green, telling him they are now progressing well, overcoming the early potash uptake problems.
The Warren County farmer has no insect pressure now as Mullen points out in the new HAT video, but he says walk your fields because there are issues elsewhere in the state.
“I’ve seen some issues with army worms, but those are more or less where we’ve had cover crops like rye or where the corn was planted to a grass type hay. Army worms are probably going to stay around until the end of June. Also in a couple of weeks we might see some rootworm feeding, and I would encourage those people who are maybe in a continuous corn situation for 5 or 6 years to make sure the trait is giving us the protection we need.”
Click the video to see the fields and more observations from Mullen.