Posted August 13, 2024 | By: Nutrien Ag Solutions

Crop Consultant Tyler Richardson returns to Agronomy for your Acres sharing the challenges growers are facing battling weeds and late-season diseases. Hear Tyler's outlook on Missouri's soybeans and corn.

Episode Transcript:

Now, we're going to go to the other side of the Show-Me state for another Agronomy for your Acres. Joining us now is Tyler Richardson. He's a Crop Consultant with Nutrien Ag Solutions out of Bowling Green, Missouri.

And Tyler, thanks for talking with us this week. Good to be back, Mike. Thanks for having me. Last time we spoke, you mentioned that rain was making planting a difficult challenge for a lot of Missouri growers. But now I understand we've got weed pressures putting some  challenges on those growers. Tyler, can you fill us in? Yeah, absolutely.

Here in Missouri, we've been blessed with ample rainfall this growing season. A lot of areas in which we've surpassed our average annual rainfall totals and that hasn't come without its own set of challenges. In early April, we had a great window to plant. We got corn in the ground, soybean burndown sprayed and even some soybeans planted.

But around the 20th of April, the rain sat in and we had a 30-day window to where nobody could get in the field. So when we did get back in the field, our residuals had ran their course and we were having to go after some weeds that were too big to spray in the first place. So may seem to be a time of getting secondary residuals in place to control the next flush of weeds, and revisiting our original spray plan to make sure we had enough horsepower in that tank to take down those large weeds.

So fast forward here to August, it's more evident than ever that the future of weed control, it's going to be important that we incorporate overlapping residuals with multiple modes of action and, you know, our tools as far as what we have in a post application in soybeans are very limited and we want to make sure those worked for many generations to come.

It's certainly proving to be that the easiest water hemp to control was one that never came up in the first place. That's true. Tyler, that's a great point. You've mentioned weeds, but let's talk about diseases. Any late season disease pressure in the beans? So over the last two weeks, we've started to see some soil-borne diseases like SDS and brown stem rot show up.

There's not a whole lot we can do at this point in the season other than take note of where they are, the pressures, and make a game plan for next year. As far as foliar diseases, it's been pretty minimal and I like to credit a lot of that to growers starting to take a very proactive approach when it comes to managing diseases in soybeans by budgeting a fungicide pass in their chemical program.

We've seen excellent control of foliar diseases and a very strong continual ROI when managing a fungicide pass that includes fungicide with the new SDHi chemistry, the dual mode insecticide like our proprietary Swagger brand and my go-to, a foliar nutritional like NutriSync Complete. It seems to be doing a great job of controlling disease pressure and putting money back in the pockets of our customers.

All right, Tyler. With all that being said, as you look ahead to harvest, how is it shaping up for your growers? Yeah. So in reality here in Missouri, we're looking at one of the largest corn crops we've had in ten plus years. So there's a lot of excitement going into the fall knowing that we could really see some huge wins.

You know, and that's great that, you know, last year we had a historic drought. Yields were less than expected. So it's nice to go into the fall with a lot of excitement knowing that, you know, we're going to be hopefully hauling a lot of stuff out of the field. Absolutely. It'd be great to see a win. Tyler Richardson with Nutrien Ag Solutions, thanks for talking with us this week and you can learn more at NutrienAgSolutions.ca