July 19, 2021 Edition
July 19, 2021 “The facts ma’am, only the facts.” – Dan Aykroyd imitating Sgt. Joe Friday from the TV series Dragnet Over the past couple weeks, there has been a few common topics for agriculture agronomy questions in our region: corn heat units, drought stress, and soybean injury/cupping (in no particular order). Everyone has their opinion, but let’s try to keep it to the facts. Corn Growing Degree Day (heat unit) accumulation: I like to reference the NDAWN (North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network) system for GDD accumulation data. I’ll choose May 5 th as the average start date for corn planting this year. For the fields that were planted about 7-10 days earlier, we can add 30-50 GDD’s, and conversely for fields planted 7-10 days later we can subtract about 40-60 GDD’s. The first figure below reveals GDD’s in our region to date