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Wisconsin weather, pests, disease concerns pushing corn silage harvest

The unusually warm weather, the advancement of tar spot, and pests have choppers rolling earlier than expected in central Wisconsin.

Farmer and custom harvester John Eron tells Brownfield farmers were hoping for some rain last week, but didn’t get it, so the corn is drying much faster than expected. “We’re seeing dry down rates moving along really quickly here. In the last ten days, I believe we’ve dropped nearly ten points. That’s about twice the normal rate for what we expect for dry down.”

Eron says some fields sprayed with fungicide to prevent tar spot are holding moisture longer.

Eron says tar spot is common and there have been some unusual pest observations while harvesting over the weekend. “We’re finding a lot of black cutworms from Almond all the way up through Bevent. The unique thing was, within a few days, we went back out there and looked at the field and the tops of the cobs were all kind of schredded. Here, the blackbirds went in and got all the cutworms.”

Eron says the cutworms created another reason to speed up silage chopping. “A lot of those husks on the ends were broke open so we now have to worry about other disease problems and water potentially getting in there, other molds and things happening if we can’t get at the harvest timely.”

Much of the area’s corn was planted late because of the wet spring, but Eron says with the hot weather, the on-time planted corn and the late planted corn are all ready to harvest now.