Back

On July 11, 2018

To Attend An Equine Pasture Walk

Join pasture experts in the field to improve your pasture management knowledge at four upcoming Equine Pasture Walks. Learn tips and tricks for soil testing, grass and weed identification, and pasture evaluation and renovation.

The Equine Pasture Walk is offered at four locations from 6:00-8:00 PM. On July 23 it will be held in Lancaster County at Longshot Stables in Washington Boro, PA. On July 24 the event will be repeated in Centre County at  the Penn State Horse Barn in State College, PA. The Pasture Walk will be held in Washington County on July 25 at Horses with Hope in Bethel Park, PA. The final event will be held in Venango County on July 26 at the VARHA Wagner Equine

Therapeutic Center in Franklin, PA.

Registration is required and costs $10 per person. Light snacks are provided. Register for any location at: https://extension.psu.edu/equine-pasture-walk or call 877-345-0691. Registration deadline is 1 week before the program.

 

To Scout For Nutrient Deficiencies In Your Crops

Scouting for nutrient deficiencies is a useful practice to identify soil fertility issues that may need to be addressed with a rescue treatment, if practical, or to guide fertility management decisions for future crops.  Extension Agronomist Charlie White explains scouting fields for nutrient deficiencies can involve a combination diagnostic tools. These include visual inspections of crop growth, tissue testing to measure nutrient concentrations, soil testing, and examining satellite or aerial imagery.

Routine visual inspection of crops often provides the first indicator that a growing crop may be suffering from a nutrient deficiency.  Each nutrient will express a deficiency with different symptoms on the plant, so it’s worthwhile to be familiar with these symptoms ahead of time to help guide a diagnosis.  If you see a symptom that looks like a nutrient deficiency, the next step is to look for patterns in the field.  Is the symptom related to natural soil boundaries, such as changes in soil type or drainage class?  If so, the deficiency symptom may appear worse in certain patches corresponding to these natural factors.  Or is the symptom related to a management factor, such as skips in fertilizer application passes or malfunctioning spreading equipment?  If so, the symptom may exhibit itself with clear straight boundaries throughout the field.

If a visual deficiency symptom is found in a field, the next step is to see if there is a recent soil test from the field that might help confirm the deficiency.  If the recent soil test indicates a low nutrient level that aligns with the deficiency that is observed, you have some confirmation of the problem and can proceed with corrective actions.  Without a recent soil test, new tissue testing and soil sampling is warranted.

Soil samples will give you an idea of whether the quantity of available nutrients in the soil is a limiting factor, while tissue testing will tell you what the plant is accessing from the soil and if there is a potential issue with nutrient uptake by the plant due to soil compaction or root stress.  Soil samples and tissue samples collected from areas exhibiting the deficiency and those not exhibiting the deficiency can be compared to determine what nutrient is deficient.

If tissue tests from good and bad areas of a field can’t be compared, then you can use standard nutrient sufficiency ranges to interpret the tissue test results.  When using these sufficiency ranges, it is absolutely critical to sample the correct plant part for a given growth stage, because the tissue test sufficiency ranges are calibrated for specific growth stages and plant parts.  The lab you are submitting your tissue test samples to should have guidelines available for which plant part to sample at which growth stage.  For instance, the Penn State Agricultural Analytical Services Lab provides detailed sampling instructions here:https://agsci.psu.edu/aasl/plant-analysis/plant-tissue-total-analysis/instructions-for-taking-samples-for-plant-analysis

One tool that can be useful to help in scouting for potential soil fertility issues is satellite imagery.  Many companies now offer subscription services that will deliver weekly satellite images of fields you have registered with their service.  These satellite images are usually color coded to correspond with the crop canopy density and greenness.  Areas with lower canopy density and greenness within a field may warrant a visual inspection to see if there is a soil nutrient issue.

Scouting for nutrient deficiencies does require an investment of time, and potentially analytical costs if deficiency symptoms are encountered.  But it is a valuable endeavor to ensure that crops are growing without nutrient deficiencies so that you will get the best return on your investment of other inputs, like seed, labor, and pest protection.

To Scout For Soybean Stem Diseases

Traveling around Pennsylvania the past week or so, Extension Agronomists Paul Esker (pde6@psu.edu), Alyssa Collins (aac18@psu.edu), and Adriana Murillo (axm1119@psu.edu) have noted that soybean growth and development is all over the board, with some fields only recently planted, while others now at flowering (R1 to R2 growth stages). They also noted that within some of these fields the soybean stand is variable, which maybe is not all that unsurprising given the spring conditions we observed with lots of rainfall.

With that background, this is a very good time to take an assessment of the stand quality, especially related to soybean stem diseases. As the season continues we need to pay attention to pockets or areas of the field where the stand does not appear to be improving. In Pennsylvania, we know that soybean can be negatively impacted by different stem diseases, for example, since 2013, individual losses due to sudden death syndrome, brown stem rot, and stem canker have ranged from 1% to 3%. First and foremost, a proper identification is required in order to determine the potential impact at harvest, as well as to make decisions long-term as related to variety selection and crop rotation.

Scouting for soybean stem diseases can be tricky. Proper identification begins with knowledge about your soybean variety and if there is any resistance to specific soybean stem diseases, for example, Rps genes for resistance to Phytophthora root and stem rot. Nonetheless, we can also use a symptom key to help with proper identification of the different stem diseases. We have created a symptom key guide that was adapted from the Crop Protection Network, http://www.soybeanresearchinfo.com/pdf_docs/CPN1002_ScoutingSoybeanStemDiseases051515.pdf

 

Quote Of The Week: “I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.” Thomas Jefferson