It’s been an up and down planting season thus far with cold, wet conditions in April and early May, to now just periodic rains ponding some fields.
“I would encourage you—if you still haven’t finished planting your first crop—to plant your first crop first, finish planting every field, and then let’s go back and evaluate things for replant,” says Pioneer agronomist Ben Jacob.
He tells Hoosier Ag Today he had over 3 inches of rain move through last weekend just as we were starting to see some April planted soybeans emerge. A lot of stand evaluations will be underway if they aren’t already.
“I tend to be pretty forgiving on beans. I view them as a very adaptable crop and they will tolerate quite a bit of stand loss—that bean will branch out and we’ll still have a pretty decent crop out of it. So, I use a pretty low threshold on beans at this point, especially if they’ve been in the ground for a while. I tend to set that threshold at 70,000.”
Jacob says how you determine that is up to you.
“Whether you want to use a hoop or measure a row and count plants within that, but the important part is to make sure that that your sample is representative across that field and that you have a good idea for uniformity.”
Jacob details what he means by making sure your sample is representative of the whole field.
“You may have a part of the field that laid a little higher in some instances, or whatever that variation in terrain might be, and have a pretty decent stand there, and then pockets of the field that are inadequate. Then that leads to more difficult decisions. Do we replant the whole field? Is it something that we can spot in?”
When making that decision, Jacob encourages you to reach out to your local Pioneer sales rep or agronomist to help. Find them at pioneer.com/FINDMYREP.
