All Posts from 2018

Common manners suggest that you remove your shoes before entering someone’s home as a guest. Does this etiquette apply to entering a farmer’s field? 
 
During a recent scouting day, I encountered an area of Palmer amaranth next to a field I was exiting. If you don’t already know it, Palmer is our next big weed challenge. And if you thought controlling waterhemp was tough—Palmer is even tougher.
 
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This past season farmers planted 10.9 million acres of soybeans in llinois, up 3% from the previous year, according to the latest USDA NASS survey. A portion of these acres were the result of soybeans following soybeans in the crop rotation. What are some of the considerations we should have when planning a monoculture crop rotation such as beans after beans, and what are some practices that we can adopt to minimize the environmental impacts...

Last fall I had the opportunity to sit down separately with two new aerial imagery companies, AKER and IntelinAir. They both have unique ways of giving growers and retailers a set of eyes on their crops they may not have had access to before. 

Entry level drones have become very affordable and I know a lot of operations that utilize them to do basic aerial...

Over the course of the 2018 growing season, I was challenged to review a few different soybean-scouting apps that are available on both iOS and Android platforms. And, after sampling several options that are currently available, I found some were informative but rather difficult to maneuver, or just too plain clumsy and complicated to make them of use in my opinion. 
 
However, I did find one app that suited my taste...
It has been a pretty good year for corn and soybeans across the Corn Belt and many of you may be wondering about your potential crop yields. For corn, the yield component method is a pretty good indicator of yield and if you do enough subsamples in a field you will get a pretty good idea.
 
However, soybean yield is notoriously difficult to predict even though the math seems fairly simple: plants per acre x pods per...

Lowell Gentry will demonstrate annual nutrient losses from tile drained agricultural watersheds in east central Illinois and will focus on a replicated tile drainage study under a corn/soybean rotation. Our research...

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