Blog

While it seems like most alfalfa fields are greening up quite nicely this spring, there have been a few reports of winter injury in alfalfa stands, especially if stands or parts of stands may have been covered by sheets of ice during the winter.

Take some time now to evaluate stands for...

Does the recent increase in nitrogen (N) cost and the increase in corn grain price warrant a change in nitrogen rates in 2021?  The following discussion gives an overview of the current N cost and corn price situation

New crop corn for delivery during the fall of 2021 was $4.05 per bushel...

The final April climatological outlooks issued by the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) show elevated chances of warmer than average temperatures. On the precipitation front, there is no clear signal for Iowa, as outlooks continues to show a moderate La Niña configuration with above average...

The 2021 moth trapping season is underway, and our volunteers placed traps the week of March 28. Black cutworm (BCW) monitoring is a long-standing project in Iowa, and true armyworm (TAW) was added in 2017. Both of these pests are migratory, making it difficult to predict where populations will...

As it has started to warm up, folks are ready to implement early-spring weed management programs, especially in fields with infestations of winter annuals like field pennycress and marestail (horseweed). Spring burndown (preplant) herbicide programs should target winter annual plants at the...

Program Specialist Levi Powell with ISU Digital Ag explains a quick tutorial for checking the closing wheel alignment of your planter in the shop before heading to the field.

Occasionally, corn planted after a cereal rye cover crop may have reduced yields. Proposed reasons for this yield decline include allelopathy, seedling disease, nitrogen immobilization and poor planter performance. In our lab, we are interested in understanding how seedling disease and...

Spring planting season may come with added challenges as growers continue to deal with the effects of last August’s derecho event. Many fields through central Iowa were riddled with downed corn, and while some fields were able to be partially harvested, others were damaged so severely that...

Volunteer corn remains high on many minds this spring and one of the biggest questions is how much of those corn seed will germinate this spring. In an effort to learn more about the challenge we’re facing, Bob Hartzler collected soil and corn ears from the same fields he collected from last...

Levi Powell with ISU Digital Ag walks through calculating and setting downforce for your planter and how downforce affects your performance in the field.

With a long winter coming to an end, our focus now turns to planter setup. While we often focus on new equipment and updates to our planters, knowledge of the basic function of the planter and the role each part of the planter plays in seeding depth and spacing, as well as upkeep of these parts...