Late disease issues may ding yields

Jeff Magyar

We’re too dry again. Some of the beans in the area are losing all their leaves. I don’t think there’ll be any September run beans, but some guys that planted 2.2s and 2.1s have plants that are losing leaves. They aren’t 50- to 60- bushel beans looking at them as the leaves come off. We had miserable heat and the plants just gave up. Plants that were showing no signs of changing just started yellowing everywhere in the fields after last week’s heat. The beans that were stressed from too much moisture earlier never bounced back. They’ve giving up. They’ve had enough.

White mold is terrible in some areas. I would say 25% to 30% of the soybean acres around here show a sign of white mold just driving by at 50 miles an hour. In other years, I have seen 70-bushel beans in one field and then you get a section that has bad white mold and yields go to 25. And it hurts the quality.

The early corn is at black layer and the husk is starting to dry. I think most everyone had plenty of nitrogen or the plant didn’t have enough moisture to use it all because corn is very green and the husks are starting to dry, which is not normal in this area. The last corn that was planted I think will be affected by this heat and dry weather. I know sweet corn in this area had terrible tip back which is not normally a good sign for field corn. The sweet corn producers around here are not very proud of their crop. I was surprised watching some sweet corn that wasn’t ready yet and the plants just died. 

Kyle Nietfeld

We’ve been dry here for the last couple weeks. If we could catch a couple of rains, it would still help finish the crop out. I think on the soybeans it would be nice if we got some extra moisture to help finish filling out the pods. I really hope the corn had enough ground moisture to finish it. I don’t think this dry spell going to hurt it a whole lot. I think most everything will be OK. We had some ground moisture to work with. 

Some white mold showed up here in soybeans. I think there’ll be some yield loss from that, but there’s not much you can do about it. We’re seeing it in parts of fields here and there. It’s not really bad, but in the river bottoms there are some spots that are really bad. Overall, I don’t think it’s the end of the world around here, but there will be some yield loss. There were lot of hot, humid days in August and a lot of fog in the mornings that contributed to white mold problems. There is some small amount of disease showing up in the corn, but nothing really that will affect the yield a whole lot.

I think harvest will be about a week later than we started last year on corn. We’ll probably run some corn first. I don’t foresee as many soybeans being ready to combine early so maybe we’ll start with them the first of October this year, or maybe the last week of September. We’ll probably run a little bit of corn the last week of September and then then go into beans. There’s not going to be any record setting yields here but it’s going to be above average yield wise for our area. We have consistent, nice crops.

Doug Miller

We’re going to be probably a week to 10 days later getting started with harvest than we normally are and I attribute that to all the smoke-filled days this summer. Usually, we start about time the Farm Science Review gets going, but it’s not going to happen this year. Hopefully the last week of September we’ll get going. My son Charlie hand shelled some corn over the weekend and he said it was 28%, which probably means probably 32% or 33% once we start into the field. We’ll let that dry for a while. We’ve had those years before with wet corn at harvest. We just buy more propane and harvest takes longer but we’ll just do the best we can with equipment we’ve got.

It’s a treat when you have to mow the grass about every five days in August and that’s what’s been happening. I cut grass yesterday and it is starting to show some dry weather stress.

For a few years we’ve just been budgeting in fungicide for both corn and beans. We did one round of that right after the corn tassel and the last week of July we sprayed fungicide on the beans. We have some disease showing up in the beans and corn both. I hope they’re far enough along it’s not going to have a big impact.

We’ve done a lot of grain bin maintenance, just checking motors, belts and augers out, and dryer maintenance. We emptied the bins. It was mid-July when we finally took the last load of grain in. I don’t like store corn much later than that. We had the corn head in the shop last week and I think it’s ready to go. 

We are planning on planting 105 acres wheat this year. I doubt that field for wheat will be the first beans we cut. They just don’t look like they’re as far along as some of the others we’ve got. But we’ll get on them as soon as they’re ready and pop the wheat and ground. 

Lawrence Onweller

We had one of the driest months on record this spring and now for the last part of July and August we’ve been getting timely rains. We just got enough, I think. Last Wednesday we got another inch and that’s really helping finish things out. We had a hot spell here last week and I think that kind of helped things get caught up. 

Our Fulton County Fair is over Labor Day weekend. As we’re driving to the fair every year, we notice the beans are starting to turn and by the time the fair is over you’ll see fields that are pretty much all yellow. That same thing happened again this year, so it seems like we’re catching up on the beans. 

The corn is starting to show disease in some of the fields, either tar spot or northern corn leaf blight. We’ve had really nice rains the last month and a half. I doubt if the disease limits the yield a whole lot because the ear can draw from the plant and that need for photosynthesis is done. OSU Extension said tar spot is here to stay. It’s something we’re going to have to deal with every year. The planes were really going right during tassel this year. There was a lot of fungicide sprayed up here.

If it was planted late, it was hard for the corn crop to catch up. I think we gained some with the heat, but people are still talking about the smoke and how that affected things this summer. It made it a lot cooler. We didn’t have really much hot weather this summer.