One of the 24 stops along the 99 mile crop tour through Dodge County on July 18.
Listen this weeks extension corner:
This is Dr. Nathan Mueller, your local agronomist with Nebraska Extension for Dodge and Washington counties. On July 18, I conducted my third annual mid-July crop tour of Dodge County. The goal of the tour is to highlight crop conditions, pests, diseases, and other important agronomic issues in the area. You can view the crop tour report with plenty of pictures at croptechcafe.org
70% of the corn crop is in good condition across the county. Soil moisture is better than average for mid-July that voids well for a good dryland corn crop. However, the corn that is in very poor to fair condition was created from three issues. First was early emergence problems and damping off with April-planted corn, second was flooding in the Pebble Creek bottom and Platte River Valley near Fremont following the June 18th storm, last was green snap from the July 5th storm. The corn crop ranges from V11 to blister ear stage. The April planted corn is now in the blister ear stage and May planted corn is in the V18 to silking. The corn crop is largely disease free with only low incidence and severity of gray leaf and holcus spot. Common rust was at high incidence but low severity across the county. The observations from the tour match other reports of low gray leaf spot incidence around the state. Northern and western corn rootworm beetles are now out in corn fields. I did find Japanese beetles, a newer insect we need to watch for in coming years since it can clip corn silks during pollination.
75% of the soybean crop is in good condition across the county. Many wet spots had to be replanted, but we don’t have the amount of prevented planting acres like we did in 2015. The wind and hail damage impacted significantly less soybean acres. The range in growth stages is very similar to last year, two trifoliolates to beginning pod. Narrow row and some 30 inch row soybeans are already canopied and about 30 inches tall. Bacterial leaf blight was the only disease of significance. Luckily, bacterial blight will be curtailed this week with the hot weather and it rarely is a disease the impacts yield. There are numerous different insects causing defoliation this year, but even as collective whole they are not defoliating the soybean canopy at sufficient levels to warrant treatment at this time. Bean leaf beetle, southern corn rootworm, Japanese beetle, yellow-striped armyworm, alfalfa caterpillar, and grasshoppers were the most frequently found defoliator species. Our soybeans looks good right now, but the soybean crop is mostly made during August.
To view the full crop tour report, visit our local website at croptechcafe.org. Know your crop, know your tech, know your bottom line. This is Dr. Nathan Mueller, your local agronomist for Nebraska Extension on KTIC radio.
