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Latham Hi‑Tech Seeds

Staging and Application: Make the Right Decisions

Planting across Latham Country has been progressing at a rapid pace and it will not be long before post-emergence spraying will begin. When to spray, what to spray, should I spray . . . these are some of the questions growers need to consider before heading to the field. I believe “when to spray” is one of the most critical decisions a grower will make. Damaging or injuring a young plant can have lasting affects that may not be visible to the naked eye. Understanding growth stages and relating this to the labeled requirements is a key to successful growing season. Let’s take a look at corn first.

Labels typically refer to growth stages for application timing and the chart below is a good reference.

Image: University of Illinois

VE Stage – Corn emergence occurs when the coleoptiles reach and break through the soil surface. Normally, corn requires approximately 100-200 GDUs to emerge, which can be four to five days after planting. At this stage, growth is also taking place below the ground as the nodal root system begins to grow.

Emergence may occur as rapidly as four or five days after planting in warm moist soil, or may take three weeks or more in cool soils. A new leaf will appear about every three days during early growth, while later leaves developing during warmer conditions may appear in one to two days. Full season hybrids in the central Corn Belt typically can produce 21 to 22 leaves. Earlier maturing hybrids will produce fewer leaves.

Keep these numbers in mind as you plan out your season and prepare to spray your fields. Within a month after planting, a corn plant can go from the bag to V5-V7 if conditions are favorable.

Soybeans in a given field will not be in the same stage at the same time. When staging a field of soybeans, each V or R stage is defined when 50% or more of the plants in the field are in or beyond that stage. This makes it important to understand staging and development since not every plant in the field will be at the same stage when determining application timing. The chart below is a good reference for staging.

The general rule of thumb is to figure five days between growth stages in soybeans. The most important growth stage is R1 which is classified as one flower open at any node on the main stem. Soybean flowers are very sensitive and herbicide application should be avoided at this stage. R1 can begin before canopy closure and the temptation is there to make that final application before canopy closure. A good pre-plant program can help avoid the need for late season spraying and a few late escapes is not worth the consequences from spraying post-flower.

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steve-sick

May 25, 2023

Agronomics, Corn, Crop, Emergence, Growth Stages, Soybeans, Tech Tuesday
Latham Hi‑Tech Seeds

Seed Treatment Pays

Benefits of seed treatment include protecting seed from rot, seedling blights and insects, as well as improved germination. Seed treatments also help prevent the spread of plant diseases and reduce the risk of replant.

Seed treatments are one of the most efficient crop protection technologies as they reduce farmers’ need for foliar spray applications. They also offer some certainty because field and weather conditions can prevent farmers from entering the field to apply fungicide and/or insecticide after seeding.

Applying treatment directly on the seed before planting protects seeds and young plants, regardless of field conditions. Because seed treatment is a targeted, one-time application of pesticides to seeds, seedlings are protected during their most vulnerable stages of growth. Spraying fungicides or insecticides during these early growth stages is unlikely to be as effective because sprays are less targeted.

Treated seeds carry a precise amount of pesticide that protects the seed during early growth, which is the critical growth period before and during germination. Seed treatments also are a “curative treatment,” protecting plants against seed-borne diseases.

Research shows that seed treatments deliver more robust seedlings to farmers, protect plant stands and maximize yield potential. Conversely, farmers not using seed treatments in high pest pressure areas can see yield losses of 50% or more.

Help secure a return on your seed investment with seed treatment! But don’t just take our word for it… take crop notes this growing season and compare data from multiple years. The Latham Team is here to answer your questions at 1-877-GO-LATHAM (877-465-2842).

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steve-sick

May 11, 2023

Agronomics, Corn, Crop, Seed Treatment, Soybeans, Spring
Latham Hi‑Tech Seeds

#FromtheField – Week of May 8, 2023

Take a look across Latham Country! We’re coming to you every week.

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Webspec Admin

May 11, 2023

#FromTheField Crop Reports, Corn, Crop
Latham Hi‑Tech Seeds

#FromtheField – Week of May 1, 2023

Take a look across Latham Country! We’re coming to you every week.

Latham Hi‑Tech Seed’s Corn Plot going in Northern Iowa!

Webspec Admin

May 4, 2023

Agronomics, Corn, Crop, Emergence, From the Field, Growth Stages, Season, Soybeans, Spring
Latham Hi‑Tech Seeds

Tips for Spring Planting Alfalfa

When it’s “go time,” you want to make sure that you have the best alfalfa to fit your field and your end use. Not all alfalfa is created equally, so it pays to give special attention to quality and yield.

Perform a soil test, so you know the soil’s pH, potassium and phosphorous levels. Sulfur and boron levels also factor into forage quality and yield. Alfalfa thrives in well-drained soils with a pH between 6.2 and 7.5. Avoid seeding alfalfa into soils that contain residual herbicides from a previous crop. Seeding alfalfa into existing alfalfa fields is discouraged.

Alfalfa seeding varies widely depending on your location. Seeding in the Upper Midwest can be done from mid-April through May. Seeding in June in the northernmost regions is not uncommon. Seeding early into soils that are too cold may result in delayed emergence, which can cause seedling rot and reduced stands. Planting too late may result in dry topsoil, which can also lead to reduced stands.

Precision planting is not just for corn and soybeans. Alfalfa should be seeded about three-eighths to one-half inch below the soil surface. The ideal stand establishment is between 30 and 35 plants per square foot.

Typical seeding rates for alfalfa seeded without a cover crop are between 12 to 15 pounds per acre. Alfalfa seedlings are very cold tolerant but cannot survive prolonged exposure to freezing temperatures.

High-quality seed is the best step you can take to ensure stand establishment! Look to your local Latham® dealer for help from the start.

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steve-sick

April 13, 2023

Agronomics, Alfalfa, Crop, Precision Ag, Tech Tuesday
Latham Hi‑Tech Seeds

Tips for Assessing Winterkill in Alfalfa
When soils thaw in early spring, we can see how our alfalfa crop fared. You can get a pretty good indication of your alfalfa crop’s health from the road. If your field is still brown and the neighbor’s field is green, check for injury or death.

The best way to diagnose winter injury is by digging four to six inches deep and then examining the plants’ roots. Healthy roots should be firm and white in color with little evidence of root rot. Winter-killed roots will have a gray, water-soaked appearance early.

If your alfalfa stand has suffered winter injury, assess the field’s yield potential by determining the number of stems per square foot:

Yield (tons/acre) = (Stems/ft2 x 0.1) + 0.38

This calculation should only be used as a guideline as many factors determine yield. Factors that influence winter injury and yield in alfalfa stands include:
- Stand age. Older stands are more likely to winterkill than younger ones.
- Variety. Varieties with superior winter-hardiness ratings and a high disease resistance index are less likely to experience winter injury.
- Soil pH. Stands growing on soil with a pH about 6.6 are less likely to experience winter injury.
- Soil Fertility. Stands with high fertility, particularly potassium, are less likely to experience winter injury than those with low fertility.
- Soil moisture. Alfalfa grown on well-drained soils is less prone to winter injury.
- Fall soil moisture status. As dehydration is the primary means of tolerating freezing temperatures, stands that go into winter with low soil moisture are better able to lose moisture and are less likely to winterkill.
- Cutting management. Both harvest frequency and timing of fall cutting affect alfalfa winter hardiness. The shorter the interval between cuttings, the greater the risk of winter injury. Stands where the last cutting was taken between Sept. 1 and Oct. 15 are at greater risk, as plants are unable to replenish root carbohydrate reserves before winter.
- Snow cover. Snow is an excellent insulator. Four inches of snow can result in a 10°F difference in soil temperatures. Stands that were not cut after Sept. 1 or that have at least six inches of stubble retain more snow cover and are less susceptible to winter injury.
While we cannot control what Mother Nature delivers during the winter months, we can take steps to control or reduce alfalfa winter injury. Contact your local Latham® dealer or call our office at 877-GO-LATHAM (877-465-2842); we’d love to assist you with any questions you may have.

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steve-sick

April 5, 2023

#AskTheAgronomist, Agronomics, Alfalfa, Crop, From the Field, Growth Stages, Season, Spring, Tech Tuesday, Winter
Latham Hi‑Tech Seeds

Latham® Corn Seed: Your Passport to Quality

By the time Latham Hi‑Tech Seeds offers a new corn hybrid, the number of places it has traveled in its developmental process is pretty “a-maize-ing.”

Let’s look at the developmental timeline and how your bag of corn seed gets so many frequent flyer miles. It can take at least five years to create a new hybrid with a new seed parent. These new corn lines like to travel. As a breeder, I become the travel agent coordinating their travel plans.

What are some of the popular destinations for these lucky kernels? We use fields in Hawaii, Mexico, Chile and Argentina. By using these countries, we can plant fields year-round to accelerate our development process. In some cases, we can get three growing seasons in one year.

We use these locations to develop new parents, remake successful hybrids, create new experimental hybrids to test each year and produce hybrid for new releases. No one country can efficiently meet all our needs, so using multiple locations allows us to do different processes to deliver a new product to you.

Your family uses passports to travel and gets inspected by the TSA to get on the plane. A corn family needs similar documents for travel. The difference is that your family typically can travel and get into a country within a day. Each seed shipment we send or receive needs its own inspection and unique documentation, depending on where it’s going. Seed is further inspected upon arriving at its destination. This trip can take up to a week or more if its paperwork isn’t accepted. Delays can affect whether the seed arrives home in time.

The next time you look at a bag of Latham brand hybrid seed corn, know that it might have as many airline miles as you do. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to collect and use those frequent flyer perks!

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Fred Wilz

March 24, 2023

#AskTheAgronomist, Corn, Crop, From the Field, General, Latham News, Tech Tuesday
Latham Hi‑Tech Seeds

Breeding Tech Tools

Like our planting and harvest monitors, corn breeding technologies today improve the speed, accuracy (reliability) and cost of identifying, developing and delivering improved genetics to your farm gate. In this article, I’ll try to briefly describe a few of the most widely used tech tools in developing Latham Hybrids. Like electronic tools, they can be a distraction standing alone, but when linked together into a systematic process they create a powerful platform for continuous improvement.

Unlike traditional methods, “Dihaploid Breeding” (DH) creates homozygous (genetically fixed) male or female corn inbreds quickly. What once took five generations of manual self-pollination can now be created in just two or three generations. Not only do DH’s speed the creation of new inbreds but because they are uniform, they improve and speed field testing required to identify performance. DH delivers inbreds faster (commonly called “instant inbreds”), with near-perfect genetic uniformity at a moderate cost.

Sorting all those new inbreds can become a bottleneck in finding commercially viable candidates. Similar to trying to find NFL players among thousands of college athletes, corn breeding also requires a large pool of candidate inbreds — as quickly as possible. Thankfully, selecting for inbreds with “Favorable DNA” (genes with proven performance) has never been easier or cheaper. Breeders used to spend thousands of dollars to identify a few genetic markers on a single inbred to make associations with key traits such as yield or disease tolerance. Today, we are fast approaching a capability to sequence an entire corn inbred genome (all genes) for less than a dollar. Considering that corn has more genes than humans (on fewer chromosomes), detailed genetic data can enable breeders to quickly select best “candidate” inbreds.

To speed development even further, “Predictive Breeding” can now use genetic data to now simulate some field performance prior to testing in the field. While this will never replace actual field testing predictions, it enables breeders to discard the “chaff” from the wheat — inbreds with low probability of good performance before they’re ever field tested.

Lastly, once commercial lines are identified, “Embryo Rescue” can cycle four generations of trait conversion in the lab and greenhouse in a single year, to deliver trait conversions in two years instead of what used to take four to five years.

None of these tools stand alone, but when paired together they create a powerful process to speed development, improve uniformity and reduce developmental cost of delivering improved Latham genetics to your farm.

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Doug Barker

March 24, 2023

#AskTheAgronomist, Corn, General, Industry News, Seed Technology, Tech Tuesday
Latham Hi‑Tech Seeds

Phytophthora Root and Stem Rot
Phytophthora root and stem rot is a significant disease affecting soybeans across Latham Country. It can kill and damage seedlings and plants from planting almost through harvest. This disease especially favors saturated conditions early in the growing season.

You’re most likely to find Phytophthora in the following places:
- Low, wet spots in a field
- Fields with high clay content
- Fields that have been in no-till for a few years
- Weedy areas that may be the result of stand reduction earlier in the season
Begin scouting as early as emergence where soils are saturated by heavy rains following planting. Where gaps in the row appear, carefully dig down to the seed zone. Infected seeds may rot before germination. Others may germinate but fail to make it to the surface.

In other instances, soybean plants may emerge from the soil and then die. These dying or dead plants often show a “pinching” of the stem just at or slightly below the soil line. This symptom is commonly referred to as damping-off.

If damping-off is a problem in the spring, watch for Phytophthora infection following rainy periods later in the season. The stem rot phase is easily recognizable by the presence of a distinct chocolate-brown lesion moving up the stem from the soil line. Initially, the upper stem of the plant may remain green. The plant will eventually wilt, turn yellow, and then die with leaves remaining attached.

The root rot phase of Phytophthora is not as readily recognized as the stem rot phase. Infected plants can be stunted and less vigorous, although this is hard to spot unless the infected plants are near a healthy comparison. A close inspection of the root system will reveal a significant reduction in the number of secondary roots and fine root hairs that help the plant take up moisture and nutrients. Plants with the root rot phase may mature a week or two earlier than healthy plants in the field.

Management

Many soybean varieties have resistance genes. The most common group of genes are known as Rps genes (“Resistant to Phytophthora sojae”). Varieties with “stacked” genes can show significantly higher resistance to Phytophthora. Specific information on PRR genes for each of Latham® soybean varieties is included in our 2023 Seed Guide.

Using Latham’s SoyShield® and SoyShield Plus seed treatments is a proven, effective way to protect against early-season diseases like Phytophthora. Using our seed treatment gives you the confidence and flexibility for a strong start to the growing season.

*Sources:
- Phytophthora Root & Stem Rot – Soybean Disease – Soybean Research & Information Network – SRIN (soybeanresearchinfo.com)
- Phytophthora root and stem rot on soybean | UMN Extension
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Webspec Admin

March 2, 2023

Agronomics, Crop, Disease, General, Soybeans
Latham Hi‑Tech Seeds

Drive Yield with Soil Health and Customized Plant Nutrition
It’s no secret that optimal yields result from a combination of many factors: environment, plant nutrition and nutrients to name a few.

Plant nutrition is key to maximizing the yield potential of today’s plant genetics. To meet the intensive nutritional demands of these plants, there must be a higher fidelity to soil condition and nutrition. Removing nutrients removes nutrition from the soil reserves.

There is a no “one-size-fits-all” nutrition program, and there are many variations of soils and environments. So customizing nutrition programs by field can help optimize yield. Today’s technology allows us to do just that!

Many years ago, we heard about a farmer who found a unique combination of cover crops that worked well for his soils and climate. He tracked everything precisely and found that soil organic matter (OM) increases by 0.1% each year. This may not seem like much, but the impacts are exponential. In 10 years, you gain 1% more OM. For every 1% OM, the soil can hold 1 acre inch of rain. That’s 27,000 gallons of water.

This farmer is improving water and nutrient-holding capacity of the soil in the root zone. During drought years, his farm’s yield was only down 10 bushels while the average yield decrease was 60 bushels. Plus, his farm produced the same yields using less nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) because leaching is reduced.

Why not experiment on your own farm? Start small and see how you can capture more yield on the same acre. Here are a couple resources to help you get started:
- Try Something New
- On-Farm Research Helps Find Palatable Solutions
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Webspec Admin

February 22, 2023

Agronomics, Cover Crops, Crop, Disease, Emergence, Fertility, General, Growth Stages, Soil