High yields expected despite late-season disease
Illinois farmers are expecting big crops this year despite encountering some rare late-season troubles.
Plenty of rain and good planting conditions have placed crops in position to excel.
“We’re set up to see some high yields in places that will probably break some farm yield records,” said agronomist Chad Kalaher with Beck’s Hybrids.
A Sept. 1 yield tour of Bond County indicated an average corn yield of 203 bushels per acre, which would be a record. Soybeans were projected to reach 54 bushels, which would be the second-highest.
“Things look really good,” said Nate Prater, a Syngenta agronomist who covers southern Illinois. “There has been some silage chopping. South of Carmi there was a decent amount of corn shelled by a few guys who had August contracts. Yields were better than average.”
Optimism reigns even while many growers face heavy disease and insect pressure as the crop matures. One problem not seen often is sudden death syndrome. The soybean disease – caused by a soil-borne pathogen – can result in the yellowing of leaves, which eventually drop off the plant entirely.
“This is the worst sudden death syndrome year we’ve had in quite a while,” said Syngenta agronomist Phil Krieg. “We’ve really seen an uptick in the amount of SDS across a big portion of Illinois.”
He said some fields may experience 50% yield loss. The United Soybean Board estimates that SDS can cut yields by 25 million bushels of soybeans annually.
“With a lot of early planted soybeans and new varieties out there we don’t have a good barometer how SDS resistance or tolerance is,” Krieg said.
Agronomist Kevin Scholl said the trend toward early planting of soybeans can make the crop more susceptible to SDS, which is often driven by cool, wet soils.
“More farmers are going to be planting earlier. Sometimes they can be a month before we actually get them emerged and growing,” Scholl said. “That makes them very susceptible to that organism getting into the root somehow.”
Prater has seen a lot of disease in Illinois this year, much of it appearing late in the season. Southern rust appeared early.
Kalaher said many farmers are dealing with an unusual convergence of plant diseases. Gray leaf spot, southern rust, northern corn leaf blight and tar spot have all appeared in some fields.
“This year we didn’t see a lot of disease pressure on corn. Further into the season as we got into August we started to see more disease pressure come in,” he said. “Some people are calling it the quadplex of diseases we don’t typically see at the same time. It’s because of huge temperature swings of cool and hot weeks.”
He said fungicide applications are paying dividends, even late into the season.
“We have a year of record fungicide use,” Kalaher said. “Guys are willing to spend the money to protect their crop. Some diseases – particularly tar spot – come in late and move up the harvesting date, like premature senescence. It may have an effect on some growers’ yields.”
During a three-week period from late June to early July, the McLean County area received more than 20 inches of rainfall, Kalaher said.
“That created some nitrogen movement through the soil profile and led to some nitrogen firing on the lower leaves prior to tassel,” he said. “There will be a little bit of impact on that lack of nitrogen in grain fill.”
Krieg said SDS has been particularly troublesome in low, poorly drained soils in southeastern Illinois.
“All those river bottoms are pretty speckled with sudden death,” he said.
Fall armyworms have also invaded in serious numbers this year, not only in southern Illinois but throughout the state.
“This has to be the latest I’ve seen them,” Prater said. “Usually this time of year, grasshoppers are the only thing jumping around. I hope they’re gone before wheat planting because they’ll just murder a field of wheat. The new seedings of alfalfa really took a beating.”
Airplanes have been crisscrossing the skies in many parts of the state, applying fungicides to crops threatened by various diseases. Demand is outstripping supply.
“I’ve heard cases of a two- to three-week wait time getting to the field,” Kalaher said.
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