By NANCY VORIS
Indiana Correspondent

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Indiana continues to lag behind in corn planting with only 59 percent planted by May 31, five days shy of the full crop insurance yield and revenue guarantees for corn. Fair weather last week brought those numbers up, but many farmers still face decisions on delayed and prevented planting.

Purdue crop and ag economics specialists held an online webinar May 27 to discuss crop issues that Midwest farmers are facing. “One of the biggest agronomic concerns with severely delayed planting is the risk of the crop not reaching physiological maturity before a killing fall freeze and the yield losses that could result,” said Purdue University agronomist Bob Nielsen.
“An economic concern with delayed planting is the risk of high grain moistures at harvest and the resulting costs incurred by drying the grain or price discounts by buyers.”

Nielsen said the question always comes up about backing off or changing plant populations. He said the target population for optimum yields for late plantings is essentially the same as early plantings, but what may differ are the seeding rates to get those optimal plant populations.

“When we plant in June, soils are warmer with generally faster germination and more successful emergence,” he said, “and in many cases if you want 30,000 final stand when you’re planting in early June, you can probably seed 30,000 seeds per acre. So you might be able to save some money backing off two or three thousand in seeding rate and still achieve the same target population.”
Another concern is doing proper weed control on fields that have not been tilled or planted yet. One opportunity to advance the seeding date on unplanted fields is to consider doing shallow, vertical tillage, said tillage specialist Tony Vyn.

“Shallow, vertical tillage brings the opportunity to allow for successful planting using a so-called modified no-till system by as much as a day or two before you could achieve satisfactory planting in a pure no-till sense,” he explained.
Specialists say there is a huge advantage to doing some disturbance of the matted residue cover, especially following grain corn, in cases of uneven residue and where rains have caused compacted as well as very wet surface soil under compacted residue. Vyn emphasized that secondary tillage operations should be done as shallow as possible. He also suggested that producers consider the closing wheels on the planter as perhaps an additional tillage operation.

“Spider, spade and other designs on closing wheels today allow an opportunity to break up the sidewall so that there is less compaction than there would be following the double disk opener alone,” Vyn said.

Finally, if producers are switching to earlier hybrid maturities, they are encouraged to choose disease resistant, Bt-corn borer and high-yield potential varieties.

Nielsen concluded if producers are sticking with corn, depending where they are from north to south, they should switch to shorter season hybrids to avoid the risk of a killing fall freeze. He has posted tables and an article on “safe” hybrid maturities online at the Purdue Agronomy Department’s “Chat ‘n Chew Café” at www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/articles.11/SafeHybridMaturities-0517.html
The complete webinar
and more crop information are available at www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/cafe