Early Saturday, (August 17) the plot benefited from a wonderful 1″ rainfall. You could not have asked for better timing as the ground was really hard and the corn hybrids are solidly in the grain fill stages, and needing a good drink of water. With most of the hybrids at milk or dough stage, this rain will help fill out the kernel depth and size, and hopefully add to kernel weight.
Looking over the plot this past week, the fungicide application put on roughly 3 weeks ago looks to have been very timely as the usual culprits for foliar disease (Gray Leaf Spot, Northern Corn Leaf Blight, and Rust) all seem to be considerably less of an issue than the 2018 outbreak of GLS that literally blew up almost overnight in the middle of July.
With the plot hybrids running just about 30 days later than last year on maturity, the disease pressure also seems to be running just a bit later than normal.
I ran the updated Growing Degree Day calculation again over weekend and based on the May 28th planting date, the plot has accumulated 1992 cumulative GDD’s. Making a best guess we can continue to accumulate an average of 25 GDU’s/day, should put the hybrids at physiological maturity or R 6 stage right around the end of September.
