cropCENTRAL | Field Crop Production Resources

If you haven’t already, there is still time to register at the early bird rate for the Illinois Crop Management Conferences in Champaign and Sycamore.  We will also be offering an online option, as we have the past couple years, for those that prefer to view recorded presentations as their schedule allows.
CHAMPAIGN | FEB. 7
REGISTER HERE – https://go.illinois.edu/23CMC-Champaign
AGENDA – CLICK HERE
Registration on or before Jan. 31 is $80;…

Biological seed treatment is a growing market in the U.S., with several new products being available to growers every year. These products are marketed to increase grain yield and return on investment by the action of a single or a mix of plant-beneficial microbes (e.g., arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, N-fixing bacteria, and P-solubilizing microbes). Given high commodity prices, growers are interested in understanding the benefits of applying biological products to the seed. In 2022, we evaluated nine commonly marketed biological seed treatment products at two locations in Illinois.…

 
Hopefully everyone has enjoyed a mild January so far for Illinois. The surface pressure systems across Illinois over the weekend and earlier this week allowed for temperatures to be as much as 20 degrees above normal across much of the state. The low pressure system on Wednesday cooled temperatures back down in northern and central Illinois as these areas stayed in the cold sector, but the southernmost part of the state experienced just a little bit of the warm sector with a high of 64 reported on Wednesday evening.…

Our mild 2023 continued this week. Average temperatures ranged from the high 20s in northern Illinois to the mid 40s in southern Illinois, between 4 and 10 degrees above normal. Here in Champaign, our average temperatures this week were close to our normals for early March. The very warm start to January followed a December that ended 1.2 degrees colder than normal statewide, and which capped off the calendar year 2022 which was 0.6 degrees colder than normal statewide.…