Monitoring crops in varied soil conditions

JOHNSTON, Iowa — Illinois and Indiana fields have experienced a broad range of weather this growing season, from heavy rains in the south to drier conditions to the north in both states.

Those contrasting environments bring both unique and similar challenges for the plants.

Matt Essick, Pioneer commercial unit agronomy innovation leader, was asked at a recent media event what Illinois and Indiana farmers should look for across those wide ranges of soil conditions.

“It depends on how the growing season finishes, but as of now the thing that I’d be thinking about in those wetter areas would be: do we have enough nutrients in place? So, having adequate nitrogen and sulfur to finish out the season, depending on growth stage of the crop, we might still add 30 to 40 pounds of nitrogen to take in. And if we lost all that because it was so wet then we might want to consider managing for that,” he said.

“Anytime we stay really wet, it makes you think about some root rots and root diseases that incorporate up into the stalk. And just to be thinking, if we’re going to stay wet, I might want to monitor that stalk progress going into the fall, which is going to sound odd in my follow-up comments.

“If I’m in the north and don’t receive rainfall during grain-fill, it’s going to put a lot of pressure on the stalk there, too.

“As an agronomist, I feel like we always worry about stalks in the fall, but when you have environmental conditions that are either too wet or too dry, it does add more pressure to little stalks.

“In the north, I’d also be just checking pollination in the fields. Did I get adequate pollination? And if I did, that’s great. If I didn’t, are there some things that I could have maybe tried to manage a little bit differently in that environment?

“Otherwise, some of those weather things are so darn hard to manage. We have to set ourselves up for success from the beginning, minimize compaction in the fields, make sure that we have the right products put out in the fields for germplasm.

“When I start thinking about hybrid or variety selection, looking at things that perform across a wide geography, because we never know what our environments are going to be like, control the things that we can control.”