Purdue’s Quinn & Casteel: Pay Attention to Soil Conditions, Not Calendar Date!

As we get set to turn the calendar to April, Purdue Extension Corn Specialist Dan Quinn shares his annual reminder to, “pay attention to soil conditions instead of the calendar date.”
This is especially true this year after recent rains swept through Indiana leaving many areas very wet.
“They always say the sins at planting can haunt you the rest of the year. You mess up at planting and have issues at planting where you went too wet, that can just be something that just haunts you the rest of the year.”
Compaction would be the biggest problem and that could interfere with stand establishment.
Since we didn’t get a lot of snow to recharge soils over the winter, Quinn says many farmers are thrilled to see these recent rains.
“I talked to some farmers this past fall that were putting in tile, digging with the excavator in some of their fields and they weren’t finding any water all the way down. They were really pretty concerned headed into the fall. You know, it was really good for them to get harvested, to get some fall field work done, but you don’t want to go into the year dry. I think we’ve kind of caught up on that. A lot of soils have been recharged.”
Purdue Extension Soybean Specialist Shaun Casteel says the rain has delayed things a bit, though we are nowhere near “behind schedule” at this point. He hopes that folks that wanted to do a spring application of fertilizer might have done that in February.
“It was much warmer, a little drier, they were able to spread what fertilizer they needed to spread at that point. Thinking about fields that have cover crops or any other tillage that comes on, most people are going to wait through that February month and go to March. Well, March really hasn’t been one for that activity. So, if you’re a field that has cover crops, those are going to be top of mind in the next couple of weeks.”
Casteel and Quinn discuss this and much more surrounding planting preparations in the Purdue Crop Chat podcast found below.

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