Monday, June 28, 2010

Crop Nutrients

We have experienced many different forms of weather this spring. The crops in the field are speaking it out loudly. One issue with a wet spring is how much of the fertilizer placed early on has leached away. With the cool weather, symptoms are magnified to what the plant is lacking. A person can identify many deficiencies visually but one will not know how in depth the issue is. Sending in plant tissue samples is one way that a person can get an accurate read for what is going on with the plant. Once we pull a tissue sample from the field, we can get the results back within 3-4 days. The system we are utilizing is called Megalab. The system will send back what your results are with recommendations. The recommendations will spell out what product to utilize and the reason why. If you have any field that looks to be behind, I urge you to contact your Panhandle Agronomist and get the testing done as soon as you can. We can't waste any time and allow the crop to sit idle. We are too far behind with heat units as is.

There are many different ways to supplement a crop in the field. We have foliar products that can be ran with your herbicide, we have side dress machines, and we have injectors to utilize to apply through a pivot. Whatever fits your need, we can supply it to you to get the job done.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Crop Issues

A couple different crop issues that I would like to touch on. Rust and hail damage.

With the rust that we have had move into the area on the wheat crop, we are running out of time to get a treatment program done. If your wheat has not begun to flower, we still have a couple different options to offer to control the yield loss that can occur with rust. If your wheat is flowering now, we can still put a product on called Prosaro. Prosaro has a 30 day pre harvest interval so we can't wait much longer if your wheat began flowering this last week. There is a lot of fear with some growers treating their wheat with all the bad weather in the area the last couple of weeks. However, you have a great amount of investment into the crop out there now and we urge people not to plan to fail. If you don't get a destructive hail storm on your crop, you can lose a great deal of yield from rust damage. We are seeing a lot of other issues in the wheat crop other then rust. There is a lot of tan spot present as well as septoria and glume blotch. These too can negatively impact your wheat production. It is all treatable though.

With the other crops growing in the field, we are getting some size to the crop and if you get peppered up with hail we have a proven prescription to get the crop out of its funk. This too is something we are promoting growers to do. We are behind on heat units as much as 100 GDUs at this time. Damage caused by a hail storm will delay the crop which we can't afford to have happen being this far behind in the season.

If you have any questions about any of the prescriptions or different options that we have, contact your Panhandle Agronomist and visit with them about the ways we can improve and help eliminate any yield or production loss with any and all your crops. We would like the opportunity to go out and scout your crops to see what may be going on in your crop.