News

Monitoring crop quality during harvest

An agronomist is reminding farmers to check for crop quality this fall.

Matt Hutcheson with Seed Consultants says as harvest progresses in the Eastern Corn Belt farmers are starting to notice the presence of ear rots.

He tells Brownfield if ear rots are found – that grain will need some extra attention.  “Farmers need to determine if their fields have ear rots and what kind of ear rots they have,” he says.  “If they have some of these ear rots or ear molds they need to keep that grain separate and not store that with clean grain.  They need to dry it down below 15 percent moisture to keep those rots from spreading.”

Hutcheson says farmers are also seeing some signs of stalk rot.  He says if that is an issue – those fields will need to be harvested first.  “We’ve already seen some fields that have been affected by it,” he says.  “During some heavy winds when some big storm systems went through we’ve seen a pretty decent amount of fields almost flattened.”

As for yield reports – Hutcheson says so yields have been pretty variable this year.