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Nafziger: Growers ‘might want to turn the yield monitors off this year’

A long-time agronomist says there is something to be learned every year, but he’s not so sure about the 2019 growing season. Emerson Nafziger at the University of Illinois says growers should not use this year as an example of what to do next year.

“Years like this are just ones where odd effects appear,” Nafziger told Brownfield Ag News Thursday during a DONMARIO Seeds field day at Gibson City, Illinois, “because we’ve never seen the combinations of late planting and wet soils and then dry soils like we’re seeing this year.”

There was decent pollination weather for corn, but dry conditions following that led to aborted kernels, said Nafziger. And from late planting to poor growing conditions, he said there has been very little to support soybean yields.

“Soybean pod counts are not anything close to what we saw last year, and even if the crop look pretty good driving past, if it doesn’t have the pods out there or the pod numbers that it takes to make high yields, we’re simply not going to get high yields,” said Nafziger. “We can’t fix that now.”

“The yield uncertainties are going to persist,” Nafziger concluded, “I even jokingly told people here that they might want to turn the yield monitors off this year because they’re probably not going to like what they see very well.”