Follow the Field Update #2: And Now We Wait

Not much to report this week other than the corn has been growing like a weed! (Which is a good thing right now. 😉 )

We’re pretty much at the “hurry up and wait” stage of the crop growth progress. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we can just forget about the crop and let it do its thing for the rest of the summer – there are still some pest pressures we have to watch out for and other things to do around the farm, like get planting and sidedressing equipment cleaned up and put away for the season.

7/5/19 update:

Cover crop soybeans (49 days)

If you remember from last week’s Follow The Field update, these soybeans were planted directly into a green cereal rye cover crop that stood about 4 feet tall on May 17. This was the first field planted on the farm during #plant19, and it was kind of late by the standards we’ve grown accustomed to over the last few years.

These beans were about 10 inches tall last week and are now up to about 16 inches tall as of yesterday evening (the angle of the picture is a bit deceiving).

As you might notice in the picture, most of the soybean leaves have holes where insects have been munching on the leaves. Japanese beetles showed up this week and have been chowing down. At this point, the amount of leaf damage and number of Japanese beetles I could find in the field isn’t concerning, but is definitely something we’ll watch out for in case we need to treat the field to protect the soybeans from insect damage. Right now, it looks like the soybeans may outgrow the Japanese beetles as they put on new leaves at a faster pace than the Japanese beetles can snack on them.

We’ll also keep an eye out for any weeds that show up in this field until the soybeans canopy. The picture below is an overhead shot of what it currently looks like between the rows. As the soybeans grow, the leaves will fill in and eventually touch the soybeans in the neighboring rows, blocking sunlight from reaching the ground between the rows. This slows down weed germination and is typically the point where we stop worrying about weeds competing with the soybean crop. The straw left over from the cover crop has done a really good job suppressing new weeds in this field.

Corn (31 days)

Remember that saying “knee-high by the fourth of July”? Consider that achieved. The corn was 16 inches last week and up to about 25 inches at the same time this week – that’s about 1.2 inches of growth per day! The consistent heat this week definitely helped a lot. Not sure that the 3.5 inches of rain we received overnight Tuesday was quite as helpful, but it’s nice to know that we didn’t wish the rain away too hard this spring and wish ourselves into a drought. 🙂

Yes, the corn in this photo was a little wet. We had a brief rain shower about an hour before I went out to the field to take pictures. Ever walked through a cornfield after a rain? My advice: don’t. This corn isn’t quite hip-high, but I would’ve been soaked if I had been wearing long pants. The raindrops on the leaves made for some pretty pictures, though.

This corn was sidedressed last weekend. Sidedressing is a term used for applying nitrogen fertilizer while the corn is growing. The tractor pulls a sidedress bar through the field, which is set up to apply the nitrogen fertilizer right next to each row of corn, ensuring that the corn roots will find it. And now, we wait for the corn to grow.

No-Till Soybeans (27 days)

If you remember from last week, this was our last field of beans planted on June 8, so not quite a month ago. These soybeans are still a lot smaller than the other field I’m following in this series, but they are off to a good start.

These beans also have a few insect nibbles on the leaves, but I didn’t observe any insects while I was out in the field. I was surprised to not see any Japanese beetles, but maybe the prefer the taste of more mature soybean plants than these.

The soybeans in this field didn’t gain much in height this week, but they’ve filled out more than they were last week and have put on a lot of new leaves. If we continue to get warm weather and nice rains, they’ll grow quite a bit.

This overhead shot helps show the contrast between how big these soybeans are compared to the field I talked about earlier. But, it’s all about the perspective – check out the shot below (I can’t miss out on a good sunset out in the field).

And that’s your weekly Follow The Field update! I’ll leave you with a quick piece of advice this week: Account for all tools you brought into the field before leaving the field. Don’t be like me and walk all the way back out of the field and get across the ditch before realizing you left Mom’s good yardstick behind. Lucky for me, it was bright yellow and the corn was short enough that it was still visible. 🙂