‘If You Didn’t Look at the Calendar…Crops Look Pretty Good’

‘If You Didn’t Look at the Calendar…Crops Look Pretty Good’

Farmers convened in Wabash, IN for a Dairyland Seed Field Day event on Wednesday. I spoke with Allen County farmer Randy Schaefer about the difficult season we’ve experienced here in the Hoosier state. He said they didn’t get started until June and were unable to plant about 10% of their corn, but now in Northeast Indiana, “If you didn’t look at the calendar, I think our crops look pretty good. Things are really green now.”

Schaefer added, “When you start that late, it was really difficult. You just never plan on thinking about, ‘Are we going to plant this or not?’ It’s always, ‘We’re going to plant everything,’ and so it was a year like I’d never experienced.”

Dairyland Seed’s Regional Agronomist Rod King, who covers NE Indiana, agrees that the crop is in excellent shape.

“It’s just 2 to 3 weeks late. We’ve made up some of that time. Mother Nature figures that out. Corn does hurry along; soybeans as well. There may be a bit of a yield penalty, although right now, I’m seeing a really good crop.”

King says that, so far, he’s seen low disease pressure for both corn and beans.

“There’s gray leaf spot showing up and northern corn leaf blight (is showing up) very, very little. In soybeans, we haven’t really seen white mold. We haven’t seen sudden death syndrome yet. It might show up, but I think we’re past the time where those diseases would really hammer on us.”

King did add that standability will be more of a concern this year after planting into wet conditions and compacted soils leading to poor root systems. He says we’ll be ok if we don’t get a lot of stalk disease coming in, but it’s too early to tell if that will happen.