About Your Fields March 12, 2018
In this issue:
1. It's Time To Put A Roof On Our House
2. We Have Built Our House, What's Next?
3. News That Caught Our Eye
It's Time To Put A Roof On Our House
For the past several weeks we have been comparing your crop to building a house. We set a good foundation for the house with a solid residual herbicide program. Next, we built the walls up and protected them with a good post emergent program. We followed that up by making sure that you had the proper tools to protect those walls by using the correct adjuvant program for the products that were in the tank. Now it is time to put a roof on the house using a good fungicide program. The fungicide pass is one of the actions that we take to protect our crops that seems to be one that some people think they can pass on sometimes. I feel that the fungicide pass is a vital part of the system to grow a good crop. When you build a house do you skip putting a roof on your house? No, I have never seen a completed house without a roof. Too many times people let emotions dictate what they will do in this situation. If it is hot and dry people will say I do not want to spend any more money on this crop. This is a knee jerk reaction to a situation, and it is completely wrong. If your crop is under stress, this is the exact time you should you should apply a plant health product. Especially, if prior to the crop experiencing stress, it was doing well and high yields were expected. Applying a fungicide to a crop provides a couple of key functions. First, strobulin fungicides help stop the early production of the hormone Ethylene in the plant. Ethylene is responsible for the ripening of the plant, which means the leaves will start to turn brown and die out. The longer we can keep those leaves green the better a leaf can do it's primary job, harvest sunlight. The second part of the job for a fungicide is either stopping disease from spreading or preventing a disease from occurring at all. Why is this important? Many of the diseases that will affect a plant are leaf diseases. If part of the leaf is damaged by disease, this will stop it from harvesting sunlight efficiently. Over the past couple of years I have heard several people talk about solar radiation and how it ties into higher yields. If you are not maximizing your available leaf surface to capture the most sunlight, then you could be sacrificing yields. Now there are exceptions to using a fungicide. If the crop has been under stress all season and the potential for high yields are not there, I feel that you could skip the fungicide pass. But these situations are very seldom present. Many times people will say there is no disease present so why spray? I don't care how good of a scout you are, you will not be able to check everything in a field. You may scout today and see nothing, but disease could be just incubating and show up a few days later. The high yield kings like Randy Dowdy, David Hula and Kip Cullers will sometimes apply fungicides multiple times during a growing season. In our area with the type of soils that we have, it will be hard to achieve the yields set by these farmers. However if we use some of the lessons that they can teach us about plant health and stress reduction, we can raise our harvested bushels significantly. When selecting a fungicide program I feel that you have to look at different things when spraying corn and soybeans. Most of the fungicides that are used in corn are a mixture of a group 3 and group 11 fungicides. The group 3 fungicides are cell membrane disruptors and include the products like Tilt and Folicur. The group 11 fungicides include what we call "Strobie" fungicides like Headline and Quadris and they affect respiration. The group 3's will help cure what diseases are already present, and the group 11's are the preventative portion. In soybeans we use some group 11's but also some group 7's. This may sound like we are using different modes but both groups are respiration inhibitors. It can be concerning to think if we continue to use the same groups year after year that we could be breeding resistance. But these products are the best we have on the market at this time. We here at Akron are looking at different options that are not all group 3 and 11's, such as Regalia biofungicide. If you want to look at the different groups of fungicides click on the link Fungicide Group Chart. One other thing to consider at the fungicide time is the use of an insecticide. For just a few dollars you can get good response out of a insecticide pass. Now that we have our house built where do we go from here?
Our House is Built, What's Next?
Now that we have finished talking about the essential parts of growing a good crop from a weed control viewpoint, we will change gears and talk a little bit about nutrition. For the next few weeks we will be looking at different micro and macro nutrients and how they affect a plants growth. Before we get into the discussion of different nutrients I feel we should talk a little about some of the theories about how much of a certain nutrient is needed. Over the past 20 years that I have been in the Ag Retail business, I have seen two different ways to look at nutrients Leibig's Law of the Minimum and Mulder's Globe. Both theories are shown graphically below:
Leibig's Law of the Minimum Mulder's Globe
The principle of Liebig's Law of the Minimum is that your yield will be limited by whatever nutrient that you are lowest in your soil. This theory does have it's uses, but in my opinion I feel that you need to look at what nutrient you are talking about. I grew up thinking that when it comes to corn production your biggest limiting nutrient is Nitrogen. Thus the thinking that the more Nitrogen you put out the bigger your potential yield is. Since then I have learned that this is not the necessarily the case as I have seen 250 bushel corn grown with 200 to 210 units put down just as easily as someone who has put down 280 units. The factor that would controls this is weather. If you have the right weather you can achieve the higher yields with the lower amount of Nitrogen. However the higher rate of Nitrogen may possibly give you the higher yields in the more adverse weather conditions.
In my opinion Mulder's Globe gives a more accurate picture for what we need to look at in today's growing and political environment. Too many times I have read an article where there is talk of limiting how much of a certain input can be applied at a certain time. Mulder's talks about how if you have too much of one nutrient you can hurt the availability of another nutrient. If you look at the globe closely you will see that too much phosphorus can hurt the availability of zinc, potassium and iron. But it could help out the availability of magnesium. For a larger view of Mulder's Globe click on the link. I feel that we need to try and keep things balanced in order to maximize our yields. Over the next few weeks we will discuss different nutrients and how they will help out certain crops.
News That Caught Our Eye
Over the past few years as commodity prices have dropped I have told many of you that you "Can't Save Yourself Into Prosperity". By this I mean that if you cut something from the program to save $5 you may lose yourself $15 in decreased yield. This week I found an article posted by South Dakota State University asking the question Do Big Yields Mean Big Money? The main idea of this article talks about looking at what you are spending on inputs and making sure that you are getting the most bang for your buck. I agree with this principle, why spend $10 and get back $10 to $12 in return. Look at ways that will give you a 1.5 to 3 times your Return On Investment (ROI). As crop prices continue to see pressure, don't cut inputs necessarily, just make sure that what you are spending ig giving you your best R.O.I.