crop scouting report
corn takes center stage
hile wheat has been the focus for most of the year, corn scouting took center stage this month. I have been tracking everything from planting/emergence to insects and diseases. Unfortunately, this tends to make me the bearer of bad news. In particular, southern corn rust has arrived approximately 6 weeks early. In almost every year we get southern rust but it is usually so late that we do not need to worry about it. In reality, our early planted corn (mid- late March plantings) are probably far enough along that they don’t have to worry about it. However, we had a lot of corn planted later in April and even May due to excessive moisture.
These planting dates are extremely susceptible to loss by the fungus so producers will probably need to figure out how to spray fungicide on their corn. While looking for diseases I have also witnessed lots of insect activity including Japanese Beetles which are moving into our area as a new pest to watch out for. – Update – the sample that was submitted was NOT southern rust. I had been waiting to publicize the finding until hearing back from State Specialist Doug Jardine which was a good decision.
- On June 20, I attended the Program Focus Team (PFT) State Leaders meeting in Manhattan. The focus of this session was for all of the PFTs to think about action plan evaluation and analyze how our particular PFTs were doing this. I must admit that the Crops PFT is not doing a great job of evaluation. However, I can say we are not the only PFT to struggle with this topic. One of the more interesting discussions was what type of information do we need to gather for our target audience. In addition to the program evaluation discussion, the state wide impact reports were discussed. Last year, a single large document was created and this year, the plan is to create quarterly reports in multiple formats.
- On June 6 – 7, I assisted at the Ag in the Classroom training held in Parsons. This opportunity was for grade school teachers to learn to incorporate agricultural topics into their curriculum. The area I taught was on soil sampling. In addition to that section, Jeri and I helped with Dr. Kevin Donnelly’s presentations. This was, once again, an opportunity to witness a wide range of agricultural understanding within a group. There were novice teachers who had very little agricultural background, to very experienced agricultural folks.
- Our high tunnel had an unfortunate incident this month. Ed Cook, our high tunnel manager, let me know there was an issue early in the month. On June 8th, I took some pictures of what turned out to be herbicide damage on the tomatoes in the high tunnel. Tomatoes are extremely sensitive to phenoxys (i.e. 2,4-D, dicamba, etc.) and they showed the most extreme symptoms. The pepper plants and the eggplants were also injured, but maybe not as much as the tomatoes.
Interestingly, the zucchini and cucumber plants showed very little if any symptoms. Ed replanted most of the tomato plants and hopefully we will be able to harvest a crop soon. The new plants have tomatoes on them.
W