– Corn produces individual male and female flowers on the same plant.
– The ear represents the female flower of the corn plant.
– Severe soil moisture deficits can delay silk emergence and disrupt the synchrony of pollen shed and silk availability, resulting in poor kernel set.
Excessive rainfall and flooding often result in the loss of applied and soil-derived nitrogen (N).
Depending on the year, Indiana’s corn crop typically enters the critical flowering stages of pollen shed and silk emergence sometime between late June to late July.
Intense rainfall events (technically referred to as “toad stranglers” or “goose drownders”) flood low-lying corn fields and create ponding (standing water) in poorly drained areas (depressions, compacted soil) within other fields.
The number of 30-, 40-, and 60-ft wide (or larger) field crop planters across the U.S. Midwest is greater today than, say, twenty years ago. Certainly, individual farmers can plant more acres of corn and soybean per day with today’s large field equipment than they could twenty years ago.
The cost of seed corn is the largest single variable input cost for most Indiana corn growers (Dobbins et al., 2017). Minimizing that cost involves a combination of shrewd purchasing skills and wise selection of seeding rates. This summary focuses on our recent research evaluating the yield response of corn to plant population in field scale trials conducted around the state of Indiana.
Every year, I get a lot of phone calls from folks wanting to know why their neighbor’s fields of corn ended up with such poor uneven lousy-looking stands. Since some seem so ecstatic about this happening to their neighbors, I figured maybe they would like to know how to prepare a crappy stand of corn for themselves next year.
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