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Farmers look for planting balance

Many farmers are still waiting for an opportune time to begin spring fieldwork.

Pioneer agronomist Matt Montgomery suggests a balance often needs to be struck between ideal planting date and good seed bed.

“It matters for us to get corn in at a fairly early time. That helps us out when it comes to the reproductive period later in the summer, it lets that reproductive period go into some more gentle conditions. And early matters with beans (too).”

He tells Brownfield earlier planted soybeans put on more nodes.

“Which means more pods, which means we stay ahead of pod abortion and increase our yield potential. But if we go into the wrong conditions, we kind of erase all of those benefits and we actually in some cases can cause basically the equivalent of a multi-week planting delay.”

Montgomery says one of his concerns this spring is compaction because so many areas of the Corn Belt are dealing with wet conditions.