Disease and Pest Control Strategies for Yield Preservation

00:00 Let's face it, you get to a certain part of the season where it's all about yield preservation. To do that, you've gotta have effective 00:05 disease and pest control. Talking to Matt Miles here at his field day in McGee, Arkansas, along with Drake Copeland, 00:10 with FMC, we talked about this. Gail Shravin got up there and talked about it. Also, we got a a, a real issue here. 00:16 It's only the end of June, but for you, that's pushing toward the end of the season. You can't just let things go because disease 00:23 and pests can come in all of a sudden rob you of all the hard work you've done. So talk about what your management thing is 00:28 and I wanna hear from Drake about some of the cool things that he's seeing to give us longevity 00:32 of the pest control and disease control. So, so what we do is we do more of a preventative. We know we're gonna have diseases. 00:38 I've been farming, you know, I know I'm gonna have disease, I know I'm gonna have insects where I'm located. 00:42 They're worse in some places. Some places they're better than. So we're always, that's the number, you know, 00:48 probably in the top five of things. Just like you said, these beans look really good and green and tall, but if there's no pods 00:54 on them, then we have no revenue. Right. So the way you protect that is through fungicides and it's exercise 00:59 And the, the, the problems come late in the season. Well, late in the season it might look pretty. There's a lot of vegetative growth on 01:05 this corn, on this soybean. But if the disease and the pest come in toward the end, it robs you of all that you 01:09 work for, which is the actual seed. That's right. And getting to this point, you wanna preserve all that yield math 01:13 that you build on your farm and the diseases that over winter, like gray leaf spot nor corn leaf light, we'll encounter annually. 01:20 But when we get to a point at the end of the season, towards the end, the gulf gets active. We get something like southern rust, it blows in 01:26 and that's where you really, you get to an ear leaf on corn all the way to the top, protecting those leaves, that's 85% 01:33 of your yield can come from those leaves. So there's obviously, when you get to that point in the season, you wanna make a fungicide 01:39 application to stay ahead of it before the disease Gets there. Drake, you're holding up a leaf here, 01:43 you're holding up a couple different leaves. Yeah. I said, you know what, show me, what am I looking at? This looks a really healthy leaf. Absolutely. 01:48 This doesn't look like a healthy leaf, but there's no, there's no southern rust in this field. No sir. No. We went to the bottom of the canopy 01:54 and did find some northern corn leaf light that was coming up through the canopy. So I pulled off a leaf or two there. 01:59 Not a concern at this point in the season, but Matt has had put out an application, this is actually an ear leaf, so this is 02:04 where we wanna protect it to the top of the plant. And something like southern rice that blows in it, it has small pustules 02:11 and it can just explode through the plant. So you're preventing sunlight from getting to the leaf and getting the grain field that we need so that 02:18 that's something that we wanna stay in front of and, and make sure it doesn't Get on. Man, if my leaves 02:22 look like this at the bottom of the corn plant, it's not a big deal. Is that what I'm hearing? It's not a big deal at the bottom of the corn plant. 02:27 Exactly what Drake's saying from the ear leaf up. That's where you're getting all your grain field Now that's an important leaf when you start out. Yeah, right, 02:33 Right. You know, so here's the thing, silly question 'cause I'm, I'm the layman here. If it's, if it's this way at the bottom 02:38 of the plant, doesn't it spread? He's got a good point. So 15% of your yield would come from these bottom leaves. 02:43 But if you can stay ahead of and stop it again at the ear leaf, that's where we can get our, 02:47 Okay. So is it common practice? You said before we hit tape record on this tape that you said, I don't know that we do fungicides 02:53 so much 'cause we have a fungus problem. It's just really overall plant health and I, I guess I kind of think it's the same thing. 02:58 Help me discern that. Well, Plant health, you know, fungicides are used for, for diseases of course that's their main intention. 03:05 But a fungicide's also a, you know, something that we apply to just keep the plant healthy. 03:10 I mean, if you're gonna go send your son to school right, and it's 30 degrees, you're not sending him in a T-shirt. 03:15 Okay. You know, you're gonna beef him up. And that's what you do with fungicides on corn and beans is you give that plant everything it needs 03:21 or might need in the future, you know, to keep that plant from ever getting that disease. So talk to me about late season pests. 03:27 What do we need to think about? I mean, if I walk through this corn field, if I walk through that soybean field here at this field day, 03:31 am I gonna see a whole bunch of bugs? Not today. I think it, you know, at this time in the year you start seeing picking up stink 03:37 bugs later on is when we have what we call soybean pod worm that will start having flights 03:42 that will impact your feet on pods and whatnot. And that will absolutely impact fuel. Got it. Stink bugs. The other bug, 03:48 when I was here last time in the summertime, you taught me there's like five versions of the same bug. It's 03:52 A red bin stink bug. You're, you're in trouble. Your pocket book's in trouble or either your yield's in trouble, whichever one you choose 03:58 to, to take care of. But usually around R six is when we'll get those stink bugs come in. You can almost, you almost know 04:05 before you go out there, if you grow, if you're growth stage R six, that's when you're gonna start picking up the numbers. 04:09 And they can go from four or five in a, in a sweep, you know, with a sweeping net to, to 50 in two days. 04:15 Is there a time when it's a waste of money? Is there a time when it's too late? Yeah, we talked about southern rust for example, 04:20 and we recommend anyway, you know, when you start tasseling through the milk stage, you do come to a point 04:25 where you may not see a benefit by doing something later than, you know, talking about an R five application. 04:30 Mm-Hmm. On corn. We want to be smart with that, especially with commodity prices and where they are. 04:35 There could be situations where you're maybe wasting your money, but if you're timely, it'll absolutely pay, pay 04:41 Off. Have you ever sprayed it for a, a disease that you're like, it, it was too late or it didn't save me money? 04:45 Or did you, have you ever said it was a waste of money for me to go on out? No, we always go out, you know, 04:50 make a preventative application. That's right. Okay. And, and these new fungicides, these premium fungicides like FMC has, 04:56 they've got the long lasting control so you can buy a cheaper product Yeah. But it's not gonna last every long. 05:01 So you put this on when you, this is the right time to do it and it'll takes you through the end of the season. Yeah. Yeah. 05:04 And also same thing with insecticides. They've got a new insecticide out that's got, you know, a lot of residual control. 05:10 That's big to a farmer. Yeah. Especially here because obvious. Exactly. You, you are season of potential 05:14 disease and pest lasts longer. That's Right. Got it. He's Matt Miles, he's Drake Copeland. 05:19 I'm Danny Mason coming at you from Miles Field Day 2024 here in McGee, Arkansas. Great learning experience. 05:23 You know what, we did five field days this year in 2024. If you haven't been to the first three, 05:27 you can still come to the last two. That's right. August 8th at, at North Carolina. August 22nd in Maryland. We'd love to see you there. 05:34 Until next time, check out all the great stuff. Extreme Ag Farm.