Harvest Scouting Priorities

1. Insects and diseases: You might be wondering what happened to your almost perfect bean crop when the combine tells a different story than what you heard all year long. Once a soybean crop passes the R6 growth stage spraying for bugs or disease is impractical, but scouting can still tell us a lot. Scouting can show why yield might have been lost from defoliation (20% threshold) or pod damage (5% threshold) and why a field maybe should have been sprayed.

Any defoliation to soybeans can hurt yield, but during reproductive stages it is more critical than ever. Pests we cannot see, like Soybean Cyst Nematode (SCN), can slow crop growth in vegetative stages and stunt the plant, overall producing fewer pods and seeds per pod. If something seems off, a soil SCN test should be done for that field. Outside of physical damage to leaf and vascular tissue, most diseases will overwinter in debris and come back next year.

Making a preharvest scouting trip can give you a heads up for next season. Some diseases you cannot see from the road its important to look in the lower canopy or split stems open to observe damage. Scouting for disease will also help evaluate standability, which fields to harvest first. The big picture when it comes to late season scouting is just to get out there and see what you have before the busy harvest season hits and you don’t have time to evaluate a field.

2. Final stand counts: Lots of early season problems led to lower stand counts that didn’t quite reach levels that called for replant. This creates a couple of opportunities for growers to find out ROI at the populations they are not used to planting. Soybeans have the awesome ability to adapt and react to stresses by branching and adding flowers/pods when conditions are favorable. So, establishing a real final stand vs. what the planter read might give some insight and help give some comfort when deciding to lower the soybean seed population next year.

3. Stressed areas: Most growers know their fields very well, but in the past couple years I have heard many say that their worst fields did better than their best. Satellite imagery cannot tell what is wrong with parts of a field, but it can show you that there is something wrong in general. This is a great resource to save you time scouting and give you a starting point. It is also a reminder of saturated pockets of the field from springtime floods or weedy spots, that can help explain why a yield map may be disappointing. Outside of satellite imagery, drone images can show a lot from angles beyond our reach. Many times patterns show up we cannot see from ground level, which help piece a puzzle back together. Technology is a great tool that should not be overlooked. Most platforms are getting simpler and easier to use and are a great resource for all types of operations.