Joel Gruver from Western Illinois University explains how soil organic matter helps improve soil productivity and health as part of the ILSoyAdvisor webinar series.
All Posts from July 2018
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July 16, 2018 |
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July 15, 2018 Originally published in the Illinois Field & Bean magazine How can we meet the world’s food needs while respecting the environment? With the population set to grow to more than nine billion by 2050, answering the question is becoming more urgent. Arable land is decreasing by 100,000 hectares per year, and global agricultural production needs to double in the next 30 years to cope with demand. Add to this the impact of climate... |
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July 12, 2018 In July, we have an opportunity to review the first half of the soybean growing season. Soybeans have moved into the reproductive stages and we can go back and look at the earlier stages, trying to gauge the potential of the crop and what may have taken us to this point.
The Soy Envoy team held a conference call recently to discuss what was happening around the state in soybeans. The topic quickly came around to... |
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July 11, 2018 We all know that soybeans are photosensitive plants. In other words, day length is what signals the plant to enter the reproductive growth stages (flowering and setting pods). While this is commonly referred to as ‘daylight sensitivity’, it is the length of darkness during the night hours that signals responses in the soybean plant. Therefore, we talk about soybean flowering around the summer solstice, June 21. However, it can begin sooner.... |
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July 11, 2018 Learn to diagnose field problems when they happen. Any agronomist would tell a farmer to scout each field multiple times a year. That is the only way you can identify a problem and its cause. Waiting till harvest is too late. Crop consultants and farmers work together to determine field issues and often face difficult steps trying to understand what happened and when it happened. It is easier to diagnose any field problem... |
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July 10, 2018 Originally published in the Illinois Field & Bean magazine Innovation is changing the face of modern farming. In fact, ag technologies are accelerating at a mind-boggling pace, as a new generation of smart farming, sensors, big data, robotics and machine learning is on the horizon and poised to revamp the entire food chain. While much of this transformative technology comes from established ag players,... |