Andy's Angle

One of my guilty pleasures in life is watching the hit television show Dancing with the Stars. Now in its 11th season, the American version of British sensation Strictly Come Dancing pairs a handful of television, music, and miscellaneous "celebrities" of varying levels of fame and fortune with professional dancers in a quasi-reality show style competition. The show is fairly well produced, and while Tom Bergeron has yet to find a co-host who can match his talent (he's particularly well-suited to this show, in my opinion), it's a good production that I don't mind giving a few hours every few months.

This week ABC announced the cast list for the upcoming season. Along with Knight Rider and Baywatch Star David Hasselhoff, Brady Bunch matriarch Florence Henderson, and Superbowl-winning quarterback Kurt Warner, Bristol Palin will make her dancing debut on the show. While I found the cast list to be, by and large, a pretty good offering this year, I am amazed and more or less disgusted at the responses I read on one Conservative blog this morning:

"I appreciate Bristol's work combating teen pregnancy. But this doesn't do anything for the cause of teen pregnancy, and it certainly doesn't do anything for conservatives," TownHall blogger Jillian Bandes declared. Who said her appearance would do either? Let's face the facts:

1. Bristol is famous because her mother is famous.
2. Bristol is famous because she, like tens of thousands of teenagers, made some poor choices relative to sexual activity.
3. Bristol never claimed to be a Conservative leader or activist.
4. Bristol's life and lifestyle are, by and large, none of our damn business.

With that in mind, who exactly is Jillian Bandes to declare that Bristol's appearance has anything to do with either the "cause" of teen pregnancy (I'll skip over what I'm assuming was an inadvertent double-entendre re: the "cause" of teen pregnancy) in the first place? Nothing steams my grits any more than when some self-appointed arbiter of who's "conservative enough" steps up to denigrate someone for not meeting their phantom standards.

In the case of young Bristol, I think it's perfectly fine that she's taken on the challenge of entering a televised dance competition. At the end of the day, ABC thinks she (and the other cast members) will make for compelling television, and that's what matters, I suppose. Some talking head's opinion of Bristol's participation is largely irrelevant.

This might be a record - I'm going to talk about agronomics rather than politics for two weeks in a row ... I promise a return to your regularly scheduled punditry next week.

I wanted to spend some time discussing Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS) this week because I saw a LOT of it last week on the Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour. In fields from Western Indiana to Northern Iowa, this potentially yield-robbing disease appeared in everything from pockets of affected plants to entire fields impacted by SDS. Agronomists tell us that now is a critical time to scout soybean fields for Sudden Death Syndrome.

According to Ohio State University soybean experts Anne Dorrance and Pat Lipps, SDS is a fungal disease of the Fusarium variety. "Symptoms of SDS begin as small, bright, pale green to yellow circular spots on the leaves," the researchers point out. "As the disease progresses, brown to tan areas surrounded by chlorotic tissue develop in between the veins. More importantly, soybean plants with SDS also have substantial amounts of root decay and discoloration of roots and crown." When scouting fields for the disease last week, I observed varying stages of disease development, from early display of those symptomatic circular lesions, to fields where significant acreage displayed the characteristic brown tint of more developed SDS.

So what causes this disease? The fungus lives in the soil, meaning once a field is infected, a producer will be managing the disease for quite some time. Dorrance and Lipps tell us that some growing seasons will present higher levels of SDS thanks to Mother Nature. "Some of the factors that favor disease development include high soil moisture during the vegetative growth period and unseasonably cool temperatures prior to or during flowering and pod set." Gee, do those conditions sound familiar to anyone this year?

Agronomy Research Scientist Jim Trybom at Pioneer Hi-Bred International says SDS is a fairly troublesome disease often ranked second only to soybean cyst nematode (SCN) in causing decreased yields and economic loss.

"Because SDS is more weather-related, its impact and reach can vary year to year and area to area," says Jean Liu, Pioneer research scientist, soybean pathology. "This year in April, many areas had warm conditions, then two or three weeks of cooler weather in May. Growers who planted soybeans shortly before or during the period of cool, moist conditions (i.e., from late April to mid-May) need to pay attention, because SDS fungus can infect roots as early as seedling emergence. Early infection would aggregate the problem and cause greater yield reduction compared to late infection."

If you've observed SDS in your field, there isn't a lot you can do about it ... this growing season. The importance of scouting for SDS now is in doing effective preventative maintenance next growing season. "Growers must clearly understand the extent of infection in each of their fields to effectively manage SDS," Pioneer's Trybom says. "If SDS is identified, growers need to maintain the field history and select varieties with higher tolerance to SDS in the future. Variety selection and good field drainage are some of the best tools available to counter most disease threats."

In addition, Trybom recommends growers focus on planting the most problematic fields last, managing Soybean Cyst Nematode (SCN), improving field drainage, reducing compaction, evaluating tillage systems and reducing other stresses on the crop. The Ohio State researchers agree, listing resistant variety selection as the top management tool for SDS. They also recommend examining your crop rotation practices, considering a rotation that only puts soybeans in an affected field once every three years.

SDS isn't the end of the soybean production world. Some seasons, like this one, it will be worse than others.

Companies like Pioneer and Monsanto are diligently developing more traits to help farmers manage the disease, and seed companies across the country offer more resistant varieties each season. Scout your fields early and often, and good luck this harvest.

This video features my friends Sam & Laura Sutherly, who farm near Troy, Ohio. This is a great example of how to introduce folks to the people who raise and produce our food. Great work Sutherly family!

For the last eight years, I've spent a week each August as a scout on the ProFarmer Midwest Crop Tour. My first year, I was pressed into service by the National Association of Farm Broadcasting as a stringer reporting on each day's Tour findings. From that first Tour, I requested the assignment annually; the Tour is something of a "working vacation" for me. This week I'm once again out walking corn and soybean fields across the Cornbelt.

The Crop Tour isn't the only Tour of its kind, but it is certainly the largest and the most well known. Farmers take part in a wheat quality Tour in the plains earlier in the year, and I'm aware of smaller regional Tours in various states looking at the condition and progress of area crops. What makes the ProFarmer Tour unique, however, is its scope and its longevity. For the better part of two decades, crop scouts have walked the fields of the seven states that make up the overwhelming majority of corn and soybean production in the U.S.

The modern Tour traces back to much smaller affairs in the late 1980s. Today's effort includes two legs, one departing from Columbus, Ohio, and a western edition embarking from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The two groups of scouts meet in Austin, Minnesota, covering Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska along the way. Scouts travel routes that form a spider web configuration across the geography, with a group of three-four scouts taking each of roughly a dozen different routes from one state to the next. Along the way, they're stopping to scout fields roughly every 15-20 miles.

At each field stop along the way, scouts will gather data from adjacent corn and soybean fields, examining factors that will determine the corn yield and the productive potential of the soybeans. For corn, this means we're counting the number of ears in a 60-foot section of row, measuring the grain length of three of those ears, as well as the girth in kernel rows of that ear, and multiplying those numbers together in a "rough and dirty" yield calculation. We'll also gather information about the moisture content of the soil and relative health of the plants in the field.

For soybeans, we're not able to calculate a yield, per se, perhaps one of the most difficult things to explain to folks who've not taken the Tour themselves. With wide variability in maturity between fields, it's extremely difficult to determine a responsible yield calculation on soybeans in the third week of August. What we do measure is the number of pods per square yard, a figure that will give us some concept year over year of how that field might perform given an adequate finish to the growing season.

While the Tour won't be complete until after these lines go to press, I have a few observations that bear sharing. First, the corn crop is better than last year. In Ohio in particular, farmers got the crop in the ground earlier than last year, and the stands are by and large excellent. While there are definite and obvious pockets where corn was planted later, and then suffered from dry/hot weather through the pollination period, this crop appears to be much stronger than the 2009 edition.

Secondly, plant population matters. When I first went on the Tour, farmers were very interested in the size of the ears. Big, long ears, eight inches or better, were highly valued over the number of ears in a row. With eight years of scouting under my belt, I can tell you that 120 six-inch ears in 60' of row will yield a LOT more corn than 85 eight-inch ears in the same row. The more good ears you have in a field, the more corn you can harvest.

Finally, while the soybean crop is much healthier than last year, there's still along way to go before the crop is in the bin. We've walked fields this week still in full bloom. Those plants can still set more pods, meaning more beans. Without a good rain in the next week, however, those beans may not make any additional seeds, meaning fewer bushels.

Our Ohio Tour average, for example, indicated a 5.3 percent reduction in pods per yard from 2009, though I would say that's mostly due to differences in maturity over last year.

I highly recommend attending this Tour, or one like it. The opportunity to examine a dozen different fields over a four-day period is extremely enlightening. Likewise, the camaraderie with the three-dozen scouts who take the week to walk those fields is hard to discount.

I'm a Tour veteran, and proud of it. You can follow my Tour updates at Twitter.com/AndyVance, or on my blog at AndyVance.com.

I'm working late from my hotel room in Fishers, Indiana, our first stop on the ProFarmer Midwest Crop Tour. Day 1 took our band of merry men and maidens from Columbus to this suburb of Indianapolis via a dozen or so different routes across Western Ohio and Eastern Indiana. Along the way, scouts sampled corn and soybean fields every 15-20 miles, for a total of just under 90 different data points in Ohio alone.

The weather this year is perfect for the Crop Tour. The dews weren't as heavy, they burned off fairly quickly, the humidity wasn't as oppressive in the middle of the day, and by and large a scout didn't necessarily have to break a sweat to get the job done. This is my kind of Tour weather! For our group, which travelled due North from Columbus through Morrow, Crawford, Richland and Huron counties, then due West through Seneca, Wyandot, Hancock, Allen, and Van Wert counties, we saw some of the best corn in the state.

The crop is fairly well advanced, though as most of us already knew, there are basically two different crops to evaluate: the one planted in roughly the third week of April, and the one planted sometime after Mothers' Day. The early corn is by and large better than 200 bushels if it was managed anywhere near good. Folks who kept weed pressures at a minimum, which nearly all did, had no trouble getting North of 180-190 bushels per acre. In the one field we surveyed sub-150, pressures from Giant Ragweed (Glyphosate Resistant?) were significant, and I would presume to be a contributing factor. In the one field we sampled in Van Wert county at 155bu/ac, dryness was a key factor, as was early wetness. Late planting followed by dry weather is a recipe for crop stress.

The ProFarmer average for Ohio on 89 samples is 165.60 bu/ac, up 3.6% over last year's Tour average of 159.73, and well above the three year average Tour yield of 150.93.

Soybeans, on the other hand, were mostly later planted, and still very much growing and setting pods. The first samples we counted, from Morrow to Huron counties, were fairly mature, and set pods in the 1,200-1,500 pods/square yard range. As we turned West, however, the beans in many parts were still blooming, and had set perhaps 400-800 pods per yard. These beans were very, very healthy, and with the right amount of precipitation, should put on some additional pods and have great yield potential. If the remainder of the season is dry, however, all bets are off.

Several readers of my ongoing Tour coverage asked questions about soybean yield and corn kernel depth. I tackled these issues in a video on my Facebook page. My page also features pictures from the day's events for your viewing enjoyment. We'll have my day's interviews on BuckeyeAg.com first thing in the morning, and I'll have more from Bloomington, Illinois tomorrow night.

My thanks once again this year to Pioneer Hi-Bred International for sponsoring ABN Radio's coverage of the ProFarmer Midwest Crop Tour. Feel free to send me your questions, and stay tuned to all the above listed sources for the latest in how the crop looks across the Eastern Corn Belt!