I have posted the wheat fungicide efficacy table for Illinois, as many will be making decisions soon. Click here to view the post on the Illinois Field Crop Disease Hub. Eventually I will not repost links from this site to the Bulletin, so make sure you sign up on that page for email updates! Follow me on Twitter @ILplantdoc…
We just published a new article on early season wheat diseases. Access it by clicking here. …
March rainfall in Illinois ranged from normal to a couple of inches above normal, but the last week of March and first week of April have been relatively dry, and field operations are getting underway. The April 6 NASS report indicates that there were 3.1 days suitable for fieldwork in Illinois during the week ending on April 5, but no planting was recorded. As is often the case in early April, soils are wet over most of the state.…
The Illinois Field Crop Disease Hub is has a new post on Pythium in #corn and #soybean. Click here to view the article. Remember that you can sign up for updates from the disease hub by entering your email on the main page!…
As was the case a year ago, there have been limited opportunities to apply nitrogen fertilizer since last fall. Rainfall in Illinois through the first three weeks of March has been at or above average, and temperatures have been a few degrees above normal. Soils remain wet, and there is little in the current weather pattern to indicate that a drying period is on its way soon. Potential drying rates will increase as temperatures rise, though,…
Snow has now fallen throughout much of Illinois, and temperatures have dropped going into the last weeks in 2019. With the recent Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy biennial report highlighting P and N levels in Illinois waterways, this is a good time to review the application of nutrients on frozen and/or snow-covered soils.
Last spring, after a short and often-muddy fall fertilizer season, a considerable amount of fertilizer—mostly P in the form of DAP or MAP and K as KCl—was applied during the first week of March when the soil surface was frozen.…
According to NASS, 20 percent—some 2 million acres—of the 2019 Illinois corn crop was still in the field on November 17. Following unprecedented delays in planting, the warm weather in September helped move the crop towards maturity, and frost did not come earlier than normal. So most of the corn in Illinois was at or close to maturity by mid-late October, but temperatures have been below to much-below normal over most of the past month, and this has delayed drydown of the crop.…
On October 17, 2019, the UI College ACES put out a news release that described an effort to gather yields from a lot of Illinois corn and soybean fields in 2019. We’re doing this because of the unique opportunity we have to try to get a handle on how planting date affected yields in 2019, so we know better what to expect if and when planting is this late again.
Although late planting is nothing new in Illinois,…
According to NASS, Illinois producers harvested 36 percent of the corn crop and 52 percent of the soybean crop by October 20. That’s still behind the average pace of harvest, but harvest continues in many areas this week, and as it progresses, fields in many areas are becoming available for fall field work to begin.
Many producers in central and northern Illinois have fall anhydrous ammonia application high on their to-do list, especially after the fall of 2018 and the spring of 2019,…
The high number of prevented-planting fields in some areas, the late start to harvest, and the inability to apply P and K fertilizer as planned last fall or this past spring combine to raise a number of questions about fall application of P, K, and lime over the next few months.
Prevented-planting fields
If P and K fertilizers were applied last fall or this past spring but no crop could be planted, there’s no reason not to count all of the applied P and K as available for the 2020 crop.…