Crop Progress as of July 10, 2009

I spent some time on the road this week scouting fields along my route on County Road L and County Road B from east to west. Growth staging, populations counts, insect and disease were observations made on corn and soybean fields from Williams to Lucas County lines.

This is what I saw:

Soybeans stages range from v2 to R2. Many plants were showing flower buds but were not yet open, so in the next week we should be seeing many more plants move into R1 (Beginning Flowering). From an insect standpoint, I did find the first soybean aphids of the season near Fayette, but before you get two excited it was a spot in the field with 10-15 per plant on 20% of the plants and second spot in the field had no aphids. Also there were 50 other fields with no aphids to be found either. So we are very early in the development of this insect pest. Scouting the bud to the top fully expanded leaf would be the place to start. The threshold is a population building up to 250 aphids per plant. Other insects such as Japanese Beetle and Bean leaf beetle were hard to find as well. Diseases other than some brown spot were absent as well. The biggest observation is plants were finally starting to look good and canopy over.

From a population and row spacing standpoint on soybeans, this is what I saw:

2009 Soybean Row Sapcing and Plant Population Observations, Fulton County.

Number of fields	Row spacing (inch)	Population	Range
30	7.5	155000	90000-321000
13	15	130000	84000-188000
8	30	122500	96000-153000
Average	12.9	143250

Corn populations were 28,750 on average across 41 fields with a range of 24,000 to 36,000 plants per acre. No corn was yet in a reproductive stage. A couple of fields were in the V14 stage with one of those fields starting to show ear shoots. Growth stages ranged V5 to V14, but the majority was V10-V12. From an insect standpoint, I was finding European Corn Borer injury in 7 of 41 fields but the activity was less than 5% infestation and one borer per plant with one exception. The exception field had 40% infested plants and the larvae were an inch long. There was no evidence of disease on corn.

Wheat was starting to be harvested. Of 9 fields along the route, 2 were harvested; 2 had just been opened up and 5 were not yet touched. Moisture's are still above 16% in many fields and straw is tough in some locations, which is holding some back from making progress.

The obvious statement for the area is we could use a good drink of water. We are advancing towards the critical reproductive stages and there is some drought stressed crops out there both with sand ridges and some heavy clay soils. Hopefully rain will come tonight minus the bad things we get with thunderstorms.