Very Good Start for West-Central Indiana Corn Crop
As the weather has heated up there is a garden spot of corn fields west of Indianapolis that is handling the temperatures well.
Eric Wornhoff is a field sales representative at Channel Seeds covering west-central Indiana. He says corn there has recovered nicely from downpours after Mother’s Day.
“All in all, everything is really kind of evened up a little bit,” he told HAT. “The heat that we’ve had here recently, the corn all got side dressed and sprayed very timely this year. We’re very blessed with that. There were a few windows to get that done and now everything’s starting to even up and even the replant is looking pretty good. It’s only four to five inches tall right now.”
But, Warnhoff says it is certainly time for a drink of water.
“Absolutely. You know, with a heavy wet spring like we’ve had, we got stuff put in. Some of the tail end of planting of course was put into less-than-ideal conditions. We were opening ground up to get it aired out to plant and then we get those heavy two-, four-, or five-inch rains and the ground conditions really got very tight and of course whenever we get heavy pounding rains, we push all the oxygen out so our shallow roots have been kind of mitigated a little bit by some heat and some dryer weather here recently. But we would not turn down any rain from this point on towards the end of the month.”
The west-central Indiana soybean crop is having more of a struggle than most of the corn.
“The soybeans, again we go back to planting date,” he explained. “The early planted beans are in that 4th and 5th trifoliate range. They’re about a foot tall right now, so they’re making their own nitrogen. The nodulation looks pretty good even though we’ve got some tight soils. Right now, I would rate the soybean crop across West Central Indiana at about 60% good, 40% would be in that kind of iffy range. We just need time and water.”
Wornhoff says many soybean field weeds are taller than the beans themselves as farmers try to keep up with spraying. He feels both weed and insect emergence have been moved up a couple of weeks from normal. More on that is in the full HAT and Channel Seeds growing season update:
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