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While #Plant18 has basically wrapped up in the southern part of the state for corn and soybeans are about three-fourths planted, #Plant18 has been much slower in the northern part of the state. According to Monday’s USDA Crop Progress Report, approximately 86% of Iowa’s expected corn crop has been planted and 53% has emerged, and on the soybean side, 58% of the expected crop is planted and 18% is emerged.

Cool conditions during planting season increase the potential for herbicide injury to seedlings due to slow emergence and reduced ability of the crop to metabolize herbicides. While herbicides may be responsible for emergence issues, most problems that have been brought to our attention seem to be primarily due to the environmental conditions rather than the herbicide.

Planting conditions in northern Iowa, especially north of highway 20, is experiencing delays due to abundant rainfall. Corn planting progress is currently at 40% across the northern crop reporting districts compared to 65% and 70% for the state and 5-year average (USDA-NASS). Soybean planting progress is at 13% across the northern crop reporting districts compared to 33% and 28% for the state and 5-year average.

#Plant18 continues to progress across the state. According to Monday’s USDA Crop Progress Report, approximately 40% of Iowa’s expected corn crop has been planted and 11% of the expected soybean crop. Due to the wet weather across the state last week, #Plant18 and other field activities were put on hold as many farmers only had 2.9 suitable days for fieldwork.

Over the weekend, someone let me know they saw a western corn rootworm adult. Remember this pest overwinters as an egg that hatches in June! They get confused with closely-related species every spring: striped cucumber beetle. Striped and spotted cucumber beetles overwinter as adults and become active when spring temperatures warm up. Most scouts are able to distinguish northern corn rootworm and southern corn rootworm (also known as spotted cucumber beetle) fairly easily.

It has been a slow start to #Plant18 in Iowa. The cooler and wet weather has kept many farmers out of the fields despite the fact that it is getting to be the end of April. Spring finally seems to have arrived (or at least for parts of Iowa), and with that farmers are not wasting anytime getting to spring field activities.

The 29th David W. Staniforth Memorial Lecture was presented by Dr. Fred Gould on April 3rd.  The lecture was titled "Will Genetically Engineered Pests Protect Health, Biodiversity, and Crop Production?".  Dr.

Green cover crop fields are slowly starting to appear across the state. Despite the recent snow that fell across the state, #plant18 is right around the corner. Farmers should have a game plan in place for how they plan to terminate their overwintering cover crop. Killing cover crops with a herbicide is the most common termination method. However, the effectiveness of herbicides at terminating a cover crop depends primarily on three things: 

It is important to keep stored grain cool as we go into the spring and summer months.  Some warming of stored grain may have already occurred during warmer weather and with the sun shining on the south side of grain bins.

With the weather forecast for Friday through next Tuesday to have highs in the 30s and low 40s with lows in the 20s, this may be the last good time to completely aerate your stored grain before warmer spring weather arrives.

Insecticide-resistant soybean aphids have emerged as a new challenge to farmers throughout the upper Midwest. In a new regional publication, we suggest strategies for managing soybean aphids resistant to pyrethroid insecticides. A few key points for managing aphids are: 

Pest resistance is a world-wide challenge from hospitals to farm fields. I recently spent several days in the hospital battling an internal bacterial infection, which required intravenous antibiotics. I noted that the medical staff:

A collection of educational resources to help people on farms, orchards, forests, and other agricultural establishments comply with EPA’s revised Worker Protection Standard (WPS) regulation is now available online at http://pesticideresources.org/wps. The WPS Compliance Assistance Library provides a decision tree to help people determine their responsibilities, if any, under the WPS regulation.

The IPM team at Iowa State University has been monitoring for field crop pests for a long time. The target pests have changed over the years, but the goal always remains the same: help inform farmers about pest activity in Iowa. One long-standing project is monitoring for black cutworm, an erratic field crop pest. In 2017, we also included true armyworm as part of the trapping network. We use adult trap captures to estimate feeding injury in field crops.

Iowa State University Extension and Outreach published the Field Crop Scouting book as an online learning tool for crop scouts and other ag professionals in Iowa. This interactive textbook allows individuals to acquire knowledge about multiple crop scouting topics to help create stronger crop production systems in Iowa. These include:

If you are interested in an in-depth course covering soil fertility and nutrient management, then consider attending the Iowa State University Extension and Outreach 2018 Soil Fertility and Nutrient Management Short Course. This is a two-day event that provides an opportunity to dig deeper into the fundaments of soil fertility, nutrient management, and relationships to profitable crop production and water quality. The course is February 20-21, 2018 in Ames, Iowa.

Dicamba has been an important component of Iowa weed management systems for more than 40 years.

At the recent North Central Weed Science Society annual meeting I was asked to provide the opening presentation (A historical perspective on dicamba) in a symposium focusing on issues with dicamba.  Following are the slides and the abstract of my presentation.

Powerpoint presentation pdf

The Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Soil Fertility web site has undergone a recent redesign and update. The site was updated, but the URL has remained the same (http://www.agronext.iastate.edu/soilfertility/). While the site has been a resource for several years, it was in need of an overhaul. Part of the update was to improve flow and access to the different areas of the site. Other updates were needed to meet university requirements.

The number of acres planted to cover crops annually has been steadily increasing in recent years throughout the United States. Meanwhile, the soybean cyst nematode (SCN) continues to sit atop of the U.S. list of yield-suppressing pathogens. It’s no coincidence, then, that there is an increasing interest regarding the potential for these two factors to interact in the field, particularly with the possibility that cover crops could decrease SCN population densities (numbers).

There have been many reports of corn along the edge of the fields yielding drastically less than the remainder of the field. In many cases, the yield loss is most obvious on the southern edge of the field, but it has been observed along the west, east, and north sides of fields this year. This has left many growers wondering what caused this. Some hypothesized causes are herbicide drift or an edge effect from the hot, dry winds and stressful conditions this summer.