If you have followed any of my work over the past few years, it will come as no surprise that I am an advocate of planting soybeans early. Ongoing research at Bayer Crop Science sites across the state of Illinois has provided valuable information on the benefits of early planting. Even so, I must admit that with a heavy frost in May and overall slow early development of the soybean crop, I was rather nervous about how the early planted beans...
All Posts from October 2020
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October 31, 2020 |
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October 25, 2020 In modern soybean production there are a lot of products and a lot of research being done to help improve growers’ yields and profitability. Yet, there is no way a farmer could utilize every single product on the market to improve yields. If they did, there would not be any room in the budget for profit.
That is why it is up to each farmer to conduct their own research to validate products that work, improve... |
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October 24, 2020 Much of the soybean crop is now harvested and growers are starting to finish up with their corn acres. If they haven’t started already, tillage will be the last step before winter. What is the best tillage practice to set your soybean field up for success next season? That is a very loaded question—let us look at the value of surface residue cover to help us find the answer.
Benefits of surface cover residue... |
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October 21, 2020 Harvest is moving right along, and some fall fertilizers have already been put on or are going to be applied as harvest ends. Usually there are two types of fertilizer plans: the plan that is the same every year or the plan that utilizes soil tests and previous crop removal rates to determine nutrient needs. For the latter plan, it is best to soil test in the summer and fall because potassium results are the most reliable. Testing is... |
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October 20, 2020 This time of year, growers are riding in combines and grain carts over thousands of acres, and it’s hard not to find areas of weed pressures that broke or even new green weeds starting to emerge. As you find those areas, it’s important to determine why there was weed pressure in the field and how to properly manage next year.
It was Albert Einstein who said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over... |
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October 19, 2020 With harvest upon us, there will be a lot of plot data circulating to showcase performances. It’s important to understand what type of data you’re looking at and how to interpret the information. A lot of times, people just want to see which products placed first, second or third in each plot. However, plot results are useless unless the winning information is incorporated into a larger data set.
For example, if a... |