Early Soybean Planting in 2020: Some Old News & A Good Reminder
As winter creeps near, it is customary to analyze the previous growing season and tweak management for the better. Let’s do so here and look at planting. We saw an “old story” return in 2020, and we also received an “important reminder about that old story.” What “old story” returned in 2020? We once again saw that earlier planting tends to bring yield benefits with it. Let’s refresh your memory about last year though. Central Illinois typically sees about a one-third bushel advantage per day of earlier planting. However, in 2019, we saw very little impact related to planting [...]
Early Soybean Scouting Tips
We once again find ourselves in the early part of the growing season. With some fields still going in and other fields emerged to well-progressed, the time is ripe to review some early-season scouting tips and reminders. First, the early portion of the growing season still allows us to pull samples for Soybean Cyst Nematode (SCN). Remember, following weeds, this little pencil-point sized pest is the number one yield reducer in Midwest soybean production. Target those fields that have struggled to meet your operation’s yield average—focus on those outlier low-yielding fields. A soil probe or spade can be used [...]
What Recent Experience Reminds Us About Raising Beans
The agricultural industry spends a lot of time contemplating which “silver bullets” or “golden inputs” should be used in soybean production. As an industry, we are notorious for tweaking the system —but we often forget how important it is to first embrace the fundamentals of soybean production. The past few growing seasons remind us of the “first steps” toward strong yields and management considerations that should be embraced before we experiment with “everything else.” Those considerations are grounded in a central concept—a very high percentage of pods naturally abort, and we must offset that by increasing overall field pod [...]
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