Scouting From the Combine
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It’s not every day you get to look over your customers’ cornfields from above. Luckily, you’ll get a chance to do that this fall by jumping in the combine with them to do some very late-season scouting.
“Harvest is a great time to get up in the combine for a better view of customers' fields,” explains Jeff Moon, market development specialist for Corteva Agriscience in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Moon advises spending some time with your growers during harvest, if you can, to get a head start on next year’s field planning. He says it’s the perfect time to scout for problems like weeds, crop disease symptoms and downed corn plants. You can assess whether your plans were successful for controlling those issues this year.
“It’s important to evaluate and make sure that you achieved what you wanted to. Or if there’s any trouble spots, you can note that and then address it next year,” Moon explains.
He says taking detailed notes is extremely important, because you can go over them with your customers and really drill down into what will work best to protect their crop in the future. If, for example, you find weeds like waterhemp in certain areas, you can make sure to tailor a program approach to protect those acres from those specific weeds next season.
“So, if a tweak is necessary, you can do that. Maybe it was a simple issue of coverage or it was a skip in the field. Sometimes those things happen, but at least make note of it and see what’s going on,” Moon says.
As another example, maybe you find waterhemp in a customer’s fields and the weed isn’t officially listed as herbicide-resistant in your area yet. You can send a sample of the plant into your state’s diagnostic lab to find out if it is resistant. If the test comes back positive, you can create a tailored program approach to control the waterhemp better next year.
This is just one scenario among the multitude that could play out during harvest this fall, showing how important it is to scout this time of year. So, if you have the time, join your customers in the combine for a bird’s-eye view and get a jump on next year’s plans now.