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Forget 2009, plan for normal season

For many farmers, 2009 is one of those year’s they’d just as soon forget, challenges from the get-go, but as farmers plan for the 2010 growing season, Mark Lawson, Syngenta area agronomist in Indiana recommends planning for a normal season.

“And then you have to adapt accordingly to what Mother Nature throws at you,” Lawson said. “If you start planning for something that hasn’t happened, inevitably you’ll plan for the wrong thing.”

Something Lawson says farmers in some areas should at least be considering as they make their 2010 planting decisions, is the possibility of high levels of soybean aphids, Lawson says adult moth flights were at some of the highest levels seen of late.

“Will that translate into heave aphid pressure this coming year, a little hard to tell right now because we don’t know what the predators are going to be doing to the egg masses laid out there in the buckhorn,” said Lawson. “But if you have high moth flights, odds are you have heavy egg laying and that means heavy pressure, or it could mean that, so you need to be aware of it.”