Learning from Spring 2021

Jun 15, 2021

As we work towards week number three of bright sunny weather, we start thinking about how the weather has impacted us thus far in 2021. As we remember we started the planting season with 2-3 weeks of dry conditions then the water turned on and we stayed wet and unable to get in the fields for another three weeks. We learned from this early season wet spell that crops that had about 5-7 days to germinate and start to grow handled the wet weather much better. We had many fields replanted that had seed in the ground during that first week of May. The hindsight for 2021 currently was put the seed in the ground when it is dry and do not worry about soil temp. Now the focus is on this dry weather. We have had many calls about how to manage fields in this much different weather situation.

The best opportunity we have is to focus on the fields that will give us the best return. If you feel there are some fields that have damaged by this hot dry whether it could be time to think about moving dollars into fields that can still give us the big returns. It is still early but maybe we can switch a fungicide application from a tough acre field to adding foliar products on a field that looks like it is not going to be as dry as the tough acre field. How to we go about making these decisions? SFG can help you with those by utilization our crop modeling and hybrid information at our disposal. We can show you hybrids that will respond to fungicide better or fields of yours that are lacking nitrogen. I wish we could say we could bring some rain but as far as the variables we can control I feel SFG can better serve the farmer during these hard decisions. Give us a call to show you what tools we have at our disposal to finish out the 2021 year strong.