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April 07, 2018 I began work as a field crop entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in September 2017, after having worked in a similar role for the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service since 2014. My focus is on agronomic crops, including soybeans. The variability of insect pest pressure in soybeans is striking, not just from region to region but from field to field. While the likelihood of many insect... |
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April 06, 2018 Greetings! It is great to be serving the agronomic community of Illinois as the Extension Field Crops Plant Pathologist. My role at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is to help the producers of Illinois address field crop disease issues that impact productivity and profitability through applied research and extension outreach. Prior to my arrival at Illinois, I had served since 2013 as the Delaware and Maryland Extension... |
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April 05, 2018 Interested in entering a soybean contest? Reach out to professionals and sponsors to test an idea. Interested in breaking your own soybean yield record, breaking the 100-bushel ceiling or just seeing if a new package of technologies improves your soybean yield over your current soybean practices? Well, the 2018 Illinois Soybean Association (ISA) has a challenge that meets your interests. ISA has been sponsoring the Yield... |
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April 05, 2018 The first article in my soil testing series, “How often should I test my soil?”, gave a brief history of soil testing and how it has been adapted over time. At the end of that article, I suggested that appropriate soil testing frequency depends on how precisely you wish to manage fertility inputs and eliminate guessing. When deciding how tightly to... |
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April 03, 2018 Soil tests indicate large amounts of exchangeable calcium in the soil, but what’s important is how much soluble calcium is present. You can ask to have a water extraction done to measure soluble calcium in the soil solution. If you have both chemical and water extracts done, you will notice that soluble calcium is just a fraction of exchangeable calcium—that is because of the calcium and its interaction in the soil. Crop nutrients... |
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April 02, 2018 Calcium is often an overlooked nutrient in crop production because soil tests report large amounts of this extractable cation. This is the first in a series of three articles exploring calcium in the soil and its need in soybeans. K. K. Gedroiz, scientist with the Forestry Institute in Leningrad, stated in the 1931 Soil Science Journal, “After the practically complete replacement from the soil of all exchangeable calcium, the... |