A Year in the Life of a Farmer: Tissue sampling focuses on identifying nutrient needs for crops

AgriNews will follow Chad Bell throughout the entire year. Each month, look for updates about the farmer and the decisions he makes on his farm.

VIOLA, Ill. — Chad Bell takes samples of his corn and soybeans plants each week throughout the growing season to get a better idea of the fertility that the plants are utilizing to produce grain.

“I want to see what is in the plants and if there is something I am doing or not doing to influence that,” said Bell who is married to Brittany and they are the parents of Amelia and Charlie.

Last year Bell did some random tests, but he decided to make a protocol for the 2026 growing season.

“If there is something that I am doing that I don’t need to, then I can reallocate those dollars to something else,” he explained.

“If there is a deficiency that is not necessarily visible on the plant, the tissue test might show that and then I can adjust my fertility plan,” he said.

Bell typically pulls samples on Monday and he goes to the same spot in the fields each time by utilizing GPS.

“I open the app and select the field and enter the rainfall amount and take a take a low-canopy picture,” he said.

He places five or six corn leaves into a bag that is sent to Waypoint Analytical in Champaign.

“I don’t pull the leaf covering the ear. I pull the one just below that,” he noted.

For the soybean sample, Bell pulls 15 to 20 trifoliates.

“I find the main stem and then go to the uppermost fully formed trifoliate,” he said. “The beans must be about done growing because there is not much for new trifoliates coming out.”

Results from the tissue tests are sent to Bell by Friday each week.

“I was under the impression that once the corn hit reproductive stage the levels would start crashing as the plant remobilizes nutrients to the ear,” he said. “But my results have not shown that — the levels have stayed pretty steady.”

Tests have shown that boron, manganese, molybdenum and iron have been fairly low across the season on Bell’s farm.

“I don’t know if that is a sign of the season or if I am lacking those nutrients in our soils,” he said. “Or if they are in the soil, but not available to the plant.”

At the end of the growing season, Bell plans to take a sample of grain to get it analyzed for nutrient content.

“I want to see how close the grain removal of nutrients matches what the universities say,” he elucidated.

“It probably varies by hybrid,” he said. “Maybe the university numbers are a good rule of thumb, but my numbers may show something different.”

The northwestern Illinois farmer farmer plans to continue the tissue testing program in 2027, since it will take a couple years of data to make decisions.

“Overall, I want personal data to try to figure out the effects of what I am doing,” he said. “Especially with the tight margins, you can’t afford to just throw things out there and walk away.”

While walking in the fields to collect samples, Bell also looks for diseases.

“There is a northern corn leaf blight lesion, but really this field has been pretty clean,” he said. “We sprayed it twice with fungicides, so I don’t see a whole lot in this field.”

Bell did find some southern rust in another field.

“Otherwise, gray leaf spot is the main one,” he said. “I found a tar spot, but I just happened to come across it. Tar spot has been almost impossible to find.”

Another concern is the impact of excessive rainfall on the ears of corn.

“I can’t imagine that we won’t have some potential ear rot with it being so wet,” Bell said on Aug. 17. “This field has received 8.9 inches of rain over the last seven days.”

The milk line on the ear of corn was about one-third of the way down.

“It was just starting to dent one week ago and we have been cloudy and not real warm, so I did not think the corn would do a whole lot,” the Mercer County farmer said. “But the husk color has really changed and I don’t know with these saturated soils what that will do to the corn plants.”

So far, Bell has not seen a lot of soybean diseases in his fields.

“I am starting to see some yellow in a couple of fields which could be sudden death or any number of diseases,” he said. “We sprayed all our beans with fungicide and insecticide so there are not a lot of bugs right now.”

There is some lodging in the soybeans, Bell said, which is mostly from the significant rain.

“Maybe when the petioles fall off, the beans won’t be so tangled up,” he said.

“Last year we had an alphabet soup of soybean diseases, all the petioles were still attached to the plant and our beans cut terrible,” he recalled. “We spent a bunch of money on the combine head to cover our bases and now I am having flashbacks to that.”

Bell is starting to transition into thinking about harvest and he will have a new semi driver this year since his employee, Hunter Timerman, recently obtained his commercial driver’s license.

“One of the guys that helped me last fall works for John Deere where they build the X9 combines and the usual shutdown is August and September,” the farmer said. “Last year it worked perfect because we started harvest early so we had most of our corn done by the end of September.”

This year, the shutdown has been extended until the end of October.

“So, at this point I think I have my labor lined up, which is unusual for this time of the year,” Bell said.

After harvesting his wheat crop, he seeded his multi-species cover crop on July 30.

“It is up and has a pretty good green cast,” he reported.

The species in the mix was designed so that it could be grazed and Bell is thinking about adding cattle to his operation, with the goal to sell beef directly to consumers.

However, with the closing of the Tyson Foods beef processing plant in Joslin, Bell is questioning what affect that will have on the local cattle market.

“Marketing their cattle direct to consumers might be something more people ultimately end up turning to,” he said.

“We have the feed capacity here, so why do we need to move the cattle away from the feed?” he questioned. “If and when we get cows, we want to bring the cows to the feed, not bring the feed to the cows.”

The last 120 head of pigs were shipped from Bell’s barn on Aug. 18.

“Chores have been relatively easy. The biggest thing has been moving pigs around to get the feeders empty,” he said. “Then we will be washing the barn and getting set up for the next group.”

This group of pigs were pushed back seven to 14 days from the usual time frame of going to market.

“I think a lot of it was the heat that slowed them down as far as feed intake,” the farmer said. “And Smithfield had some issues, so they did not take hogs for a week which also delayed us.”

For health, Bell said, these pigs were one of the better groups that he has fed.

“Once we got through the preventative treatments we do as standard practice, there really wasn’t anything that popped up that we needed to do for all of them,” he said. “Treating individuals was about it.”

The next group of pigs are scheduled to arrive at Bell’s 2,400-head wean-to-finish barn on Aug. 31, to fill half the barn. The second group will arrive a few days later to fill the remaining pen space.