'Rain, rain, go AWAY'. Major rains have shut down all field activity until at least this weekend as our spotty rains turned into a general shower across the county this week. Spotty rains throughout the past couple of weeks have led some areas planting progress to be well ahead of other areas such as Eastern/North Lambton County. There are some forecasted rains on Saturday that we can hopefully miss out on to open up a new planting window. What is the opposite of a rain dance?
Last week, with the combination of heat and wind, some areas had a couple days of decent planting conditions. We estimate that about 60-70% of corn seed is in, and 50% of soybeans across the county. There is still time to plant corn, but if you are getting concerned, we would encourage you to talk to your agronomist about the pros and cons of a lower heat unit variety.
FS Agronomy Solutions wrote today about switching corn and it had a lot of great material I wanted to pull into our edition this week. You can read more in their article here.
- For each day past May 1st corn needs 6.8 GDU’s less to reach black layer
- Know the average number of GDU’s accumulated for your area from the prospective planting date to the first killing frost.
- Generally, changing hybrid choices before the first week of June reduces yield potential more than sticking with original hybrid choices appropriate for a given maturity zone
In the past two week's editions, we have included a poll asking whether you had been able to start fieldwork yet. Two weeks ago, nearly 60% of respondents were waiting for things to dry up, while 25% had started planting, and 15% were in the field but not yet planting. This past week, 55% of respondents stated they were still waiting for things to dry up, with 25% started planting, and 20% in the field but not yet planting. We have seen that planting progress has been spotty and the numbers clearly verify this. This week, I have 2 polls... one on corn planting progress, and one on bean planting progress. I will share the results in next week's edition!
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