The Agronomists, Ep 116: Emergence emergencies with Johanna Lindeboom and Bob Thirlwall

Dealing with emergence emergencies in the corn and soybean crop? This episode of The Agronomists may pique your interest.

Host Lyndsey Smith is joined by Bob Thirlwall of Bayer CropScience, and Johanna Lindeboom of Clark Agri-Service, to dig in to crusting issues, cold injury symptoms, side-wall issues, and planting depth problems.

This episode of the Agronomists is brought to you by ADAMA Canada, the Soybean School, and U.S. Borax!

SUMMARY

• One of the challenges has been the extremes. Went from really hot and dry, to wet and cool, and back and forth
• Less freeze-thaw action in the soil, causing more clay issues
• Dry planting conditions can be good, but too dry is not
• Any spring tillage this spring was really, really difficult to get a seed bed out of it
• Some cover crop fields have suffered. Terminating in the fall was the right move
• Environmental conditions, such as frost caused a really tough emergence conditions, cold injury of soy and corn
• Soybeans were the biggest trouble for Thirlwall this year
• Cold nights
  • Corn leafing out underground with no crust
  • Soybean spiralling
  • Generally slow emergence
• “This year” What might work one year, isn’t necessarily the best thing the next year
• The terrible term of replant…how do you make that call? What is that minimum plant stand you absolutely have to have?
• These recent rains have caused the beans to pop through in six days. Not sure if they are all going to come up though
• Hail will hurt corn and soybeans — and corn especially has a hard time growing through it if it is severe enough
• There are some really nice stands out there. Unfortunately, we end up spending more time on the not-so-good stands, as we want to know how to fix them next year
• Crust busting corn!
• If the ground is that hard to no-till into, you’re going to struggle closing the seed trench no matter what

CLIP: Corn School: Getting to the bottom of rootless corn

• Hot, dry, soil, and corn roots couldn’t get to moisture
• If we end up with some moisture, will the corn and soybeans ok?
• Lindeboom is very excited for the soybean crop this year, she’s never seen such deep soybean roots
• Corn saw a lot of sidewall compaction this year. Big rain, and really dry conditions
• Plant stand counts. Yay or nay to the hula hoop?
• Quick hula hoop conversions of inside diameter of hoop, and factor by which to multiply the number of plants with the hoop to equal:
  • 36 inches – 6,162 plants per acre
  • 33 inches – 7,334 plants per acre
  • 30 inches – 8,874 plants per acre
  • 27 inches – 10,000 plants per acre
  • 24 inches – 13,886 plants per acre
• Which is better, let corn get dry to get the roots searching for water, and irrigate later, or start irrigating early and have the roots not have to search?

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