Southern Indiana Corn has a Long Way to Go, Disease a Concern

Southern-Indiana-corn-crop-a-long-way-to-go

It has been a rainy year in southern Indiana, and one agronomist based there says the entire area is now anywhere between 40 and almost 60 inches of rain for the first 8 months of the year.

“That’s pretty remarkable when our average yearly rainfall is about 46,?? says DEKALB/Asgrow technical agronomist Matt Parmer. “But we’ve continued to get rains and temperatures have not been really hot this summer, so we’ve got a long way to go. The earliest planting dates we’ve got, May 15^th, that stuff won’t really hit black layer until mid-September, so we’re going to push a lot of this crop off until late September, early October black layer dates. So, it’s really to early to start estimating where our grain depth is going to end up.??

Parmer says even with the challenging spring, if nice rain events and moderate temperatures continue the crops will end up better than anticipated. But, standability is a concern going into harvest.

“It is and probably our number one disease this year is Physoderma, and we’re already seeing that Physoderma, which typically is just a leaf blight on the sheath and often times just cosmetic has gotten into the nodes. We’re starting to see that ring of death.??

Parmer says affected fields are just a few big windstorms away from seeing node breakage that could be significant.