Follow the Field 2020 Update #13

Happy Friday! Like the last few weeks, there’s not a lot of visible changes happening in the fields, so this will be a quick update. We’ve hit the “hurry up and wait” phase of the growing season as we wait for the crops to fill out ears and pods, reach maturity, and then dry down for harvest.

August 7, 2020 Update:

Soybeans (107 Days)

I forgot my 4-foot measuring stick last night when I went out to take photos and immediately regretted it as soon as I stepped into the bean field – they’ve gotten tall over the last week! The yard stick here is much shorter than the beans, which were right around 36 to 37 inches tall last week. The weather here over the last week has been wonderful – cool, somewhere in the 70s to 80s during the day with chilly nights in the 50s. We’ve also lucked out and returned to a more regular rainfall pattern than what we experienced in June and now have nice, fairly light rains every few days or so. This is all good for the crop as they are getting timely rains and the plants aren’t experiencing a lot of heat stress meaning that they can focus their energy on filling pods.

Just look at all of those pods! Most plants have pods at nodes from the bottom all the way to the top now.

Here’s a soybean pod I pulled from the bottom part of a plant. See how much the beans have filled out since the last time I did this just a couple of weeks ago? It’s been a while since we talked about soybean growth stages, but this field is now somewhere between the R4 (full pod) and R5 (beginning seed) reproductive growth stages. These are based upon what’s happening at the top of the plant rather than the bottom of the plant. Since the soybeans flower from the bottom up, this pod was set long before the ones at the top and is much farther along than what I would expect a pod from the top of the plant to be. It’ll be interesting to see how much progress takes place between now and next week.

The soybean fields are really full of green vegetation right now, which is great. What’s not so great is trying to walk through them to get photos. It’s literally a sea of green leaves and stems and plants!

 

Corn (86 days)

Again, I don’t bother with the measuring stick in the corn field since the corn reached peak height around the time it tasseled and is also something like an average of 8 feet tall – don’t know about you, but I’m not really interested in navigating the field with a measuring tape and a ladder. 🙂

Here’s a picture I took while I was standing on my tiptoes and held the camera as high as I could reach. The corn is TALL.

If you look closely at the first picture, the silks on each ear either are turning or have turned brown because they’ve served their purpose and caught the pollen falling from the tassel to fertilize the kernel the silk was attached to. Here’s what the kernels look like now. This photo is of the bottom 75-80% of the ear. The kernels towards the tip of the ear aren’t quite as filled out as these, but overall the ear is looking pretty good. See how plump each kernel is? The field kind of smells like sweet corn at the moment, but these ears wouldn’t be nearly as tasty as they’re #2 yellow corn (AKA dent or field corn) and not as naturally sweet as the ears sweet corn produces. But it is around the same stage as sweet corn is when it’s harvested to eat. This field has recently entered the R3 stage, or milk stage. At this point, corn growth is measured based on progress on the ear. When I pushed my fingernail into one of the kernels, it was soft and had liquid that was almost milky in color, very similar to what we would expect with mature sweet corn. However, field corn isn’t considered mature until it’s dry, so we’ve got several more weeks before it’s ready for harvest.

And that’s the conclusion of this week’s update – short and sweet!