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Crown rot causing standability concerns ahead of harvest

An Iowa State University Extension agronomist says crown rot is impacting some corn fields.

Rebecca Vittetoe, who covers east-central Iowa, says conditions have been favorable for the disease across the Midwest.

“We see scattered random plants that might be totally dead amongst other green plants out in the field.”  She says, “Kind of these ghost plants, the ears are already hanging down. We’ll see discoloration again down near that crown area.”

She tells Brownfield it leads to stalk deterioration and increased standability concerns.

“With stalk rots in general, if we see more than 10% of those plants that are being impacted, or where we would be concerned about sustainability, those would be fields that we would want to prioritize first for harvest,” she says.

Vittetoe says producers should scout fields prior to harvest and perform pinch or push tests to identify trouble areas.

“By pinching the lower portion of the stalk, go down a line and you can just pinch 10 plants and see how many are squishy and then do that in like 10 different areas of the field.”  She says, “The other way we can do that is we can kind of push those plants forward like at a 45-degree angle and ideally I want them to come back and stand where they were in the row.”

She says much is still unknown about crown rot, but some corn hybrids are less susceptible to the pathogen, so producers should take that into consideration moving forward if they believe it’s present in their fields.

AUDIO: Rebecca Vittetoe – Iowa State University Extension