Air March 17, 2004

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone.

We're half way through March, spring's just around the corner and their is moisture in the ground. Life is good. A quick reminder on the No Till Planter Demonstration coming up on March 30th. If you are interested and don't see anything in the mail in the next few days, give me a call!

Before we know it, it's going to be corn planting time and then soybeans and then milo. Even though corn is first, soybeans have been the hot topic of late so let's deal with them this morning.

In the past few months I have started to receive questions about soybean cyst nematode. This pest of soybeans may not be familiar to a lot of you, and that's a good thing. Soybean Cyst Nematode or SCN is a microscopic parasistic worm that lives in the soil and attacks the roots of susceptible soybean varieties. The nematode can only travel in infected soil so the spread of this rascal has not been overly rapid. SCN has been in southeastern Kansas for several decades, but just within the past few years has it been starting to pop up in our part of Kansas and with the number of soybean acres continuing to grow we will be at an increasing risk of seeing this pest in Geary county. SCN can be very damaging to soybean production. The nematode feeds on the roots which damages the root system and severely stunts plants, thus hurting yield. At low levels of infestation you may not notice anything. But as populations grow you will start to get circular spots in the field that looks like severe drought damage. Obviously, the past 4 years hasn't been a good time to scout for SCN damage because everything looked suspect. But if 2004 turns out to be a good soybean year, and there's good soil moisture and all of a sudden in late July or August you see areas in your soybean field that look stunted or dying. Give me a call so we can do some testing. Once SCN is in a field, it will always be there. At that point in time, you'll need to start planting resistant varieties. But in the absence of SCN populations, the resistant varieties often don't yield as well as non-resistant equivalent varieties, so we don't want to switch to the SCN resistant varieties until we have to for that reason. Keep your equipment clean as you move from field to field and then keep looking for areas that just aren't quite right!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2004.

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