Agronomic Insights 10/25/24

Ag Partners Agronomic Insights

Week of October 21, 2024

Local, professional reports straight from the field, from all regions serviced by Ag Partners.

This week’s featured agronomists:

Courtney Wolf
Belle Plaine

Tyrell Treptow
Goodhue

Tye Anderson
Lewiston

Brady Kinneman
Ellsworth

WEST

Belle Plaine – Le Center – Le Sueur – Morristown

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As the harvest season comes to a close and you’re finishing up with your last corn fields, it’s a perfect time to evaluate the standability of your corn and how well it harvested. With hybrid selection for the 2025 crop just around the corner, assessing how your crops held up late in the season, along with their yield performance, will help you decide which varieties are worth keeping for next year and which ones should be replaced. Be sure to connect with your local Ag Partners Agronomist to discuss what they observed in the fields this season and to review AYS and plot data. Their insights on crop performance, standability, and other key factors can provide valuable information as you plan for next year’s hybrid selections. Wishing you a safe and successful rest of your harvest season! – Courtney

EAST

Goodhue – Lake City – Pine Island – Kenyon

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Check out my thoughts on harvest in this video—give it a watch!

– Tyrell

SOUTH

Elgin – Lewiston – Stewartville

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What a year it has been. From constant rain early on to extremely dry, and everywhere in between. It makes us think a lot about what fertilizers we are applying, when we are applying them, and how we are applying them. As of late, I have had a lot of conversations regarding nitrogen loss. There is no doubt that some amount of spring applied nitrogen was lost due to leaching and denitrification. The greatest potential for loss is between April and July when we get majority of our precipitation. There are different products and practices we can implement to help with this issue.

Nitrogen stabilizers- Instinct NG, N-Serve, and Agrotain Advanced are products to discuss with your Ag Partners Agronomist. They are designed to serve a variety of different purposes and nitrogen management strategies.
Split Applications- Urea top-dress, Y-Drop, or a toolbar between the rows with 32% are all viable options as to feeding that crop once it is up.

Why are we so concerned about nitrogen?

Nutrients like phosphorus and potassium are immobile in the soil so we don’t worry as much about loss. Nitrogen is the most yield limiting nutrient, but it is also the most mobile in the soil. It is a large percentage of total investment on an acre of corn, so why not protect it? According to the University of Illinois, you need 256lbs of nitrogen per acre to achieve a 230bu/acre yield. What percentage of total N did we lose this spring?

I hope this gets everyone thinking about your current Nitrogen management strategies and adjustments that can be made while planning the 2025 crop year. Have a safe and bountiful finish to harvest! – Tye

WISCONSIN

Ellsworth area

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It is amazing how much of harvest has been completed in one month with no rain. Give it another week and most farmers here in Wisconsin will be wrapped up. Disease such as Fusarium and Tar Spot, combined with a wet June made a receipt for disaster for some hybrids. Shallow roots couldn’t overcome the heat, with no moisture causing the disease to become more magnified in the plants. I have combined both some of the best and some of the worst corn this year. This was a year to put in the memory bank because I don’t know when the next time will be where I will be able to combine 11% moisture corn October 15th. We are excited to get this yield data into AYS and see what corrections played out with data analytics. I’m going to hypothesize that fungicide and soil fertility are the top correlating factors in the 2024 crop.

– Brady