Agronomy Update

  “If you torture the numbers long enough, they’ll confess to anything!” – Ronald Coase, British economist and author Over the past couple weeks, there has been a few common topics for agriculture agronomy questions in our region: corn growing degree days and development, wildfire smoke/haze, will rain now help the corn and soybeans, and late season insect pressure.  As usual, we’ll keep the torture to a minimum and let the data freely explain itself.   Corn Development and Growing Degree Day (heat unit) accumulation: We’ll continue to reference the NDAWN (North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network) system for weather and GDD data with an average start date for corn planting this year of May 5th.  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. Within Pioneer’s 70-75 RM zone of hybrids, we’ll typically need ab