More on SDS

This SDS thing is getting huge. I am getting a lot of email and requests for information. I sent this and other pictures of my infected field to NoTill Farmer last night as they are doing another article on it. I imagine every farm publication is right now.

I set myself up for the worst case I ever had by notilling the seed in a high yield environment right before one of the wettest May's on record here. It basically rained the whole month.

X. B. Yang at Iowa State predicted this midwest fiasco in a March press release.

"When spring is cold and wet, soybean growers need to be concerned with SDS and seedling diseases like Pythium and Fusarium seed rot, cautions Yang. “While we don’t yet know what the temperatures will be like this spring, we do know that soils are definitely going to be wet,” he says. “So, it’s quite possible that SDS will again be a problem in Iowa and surrounding states.”

That is exactly what happened and he hit the nail on the head with this article. It is obvious to me I have a variety with little or no tolerance to Sudden Death Syndrome and created the ideal environment for the disease.

I did use the best seed treatment I could find and it helped the beans pop out of the ground although it was cool and wet all May. Add the compaction from heavy machinery and many soybean crops I have grown there in seven years and here I am with SDS.

It canopied earlier than any crop I ever raised and started flowering near the summer solstice which is rare around here. I had potential for 100 bu per acre but l am looking at much less than that now.

The sick, infected plants can't fill the pods with beans as it should. The good thing is the crop is 4 months old and dying naturally, it is just getting a little too much help from SDS. It takes 140 days for a group 4 bean to mature and we are at 120 days since emergence.

This might have been the year for a variety trial like I had in 2006 in this field. Septoria brown spot and frogeye leaf spot were the major diseases that wet, cool summer.

The field will still make twice the beans of most of my other fields so all is not lost. When you shoot for high yields in a high yield environment, you get challenges like this one.

The whole state of Iowa must be high yield goals in a high yield environment!

Ed