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couting season is in full swing. After finding stripe rust in early April, I spent a ton of time trying to find it across the district. Thankfully, it did not “blow up” across the area. This is probably due to dry conditions throughout early spring. In the third week of May, two more diseases arrived; leaf rust and fusarium head blight (aka scab). Neither one will be substantial enough to cause much loss. It does make scouting the Parsons Wheat Variety Trials more interesting as there are definitely varietal differences to the diseases.
Corn scouting has also taken some time this month. As presented at the May Board meeting, I am actively participating in the new Crop Production PFT Spring Crops Phenology Project. This is a statewide imitative to essentially map our spring crops locations and growth stages across the state. The ultimate goal is essentially to train satellite systems to actively and accurately project crop acreage and growth stages at any given point in time. This project was started so that the Crops PFT could have a statewide project that everyone could work on since our state is so diverse.
In addition to scouting, I have been an active participant in our statewide crop conditions conference call. This is an every other week call in which agents from across the state report their local conditions and interact with state specialists. Over the past few weeks I have mapped 36 fields across our four counties with the mass majority being corn at this time.
On April 30, I helped at the Bressner Pasture Weigh In near Yates Center. As I have said many times in this forum, I am an extreme proponent of on-farm/local research. I truly believe this is a huge responsibility for K-State Research and Extension. Generating applicable data for producers across is absolutely vital for the sustainability and mission of KSRE.