Monday’s Crop Progress report from USDA showed corn and soybean planting still behind the 5-year average pace across Michigan with only 26% of Michigan corn in the ground and 22% of soybeans planted.
“It definitely depends on where you’re at,” says North Central Michigan agronomist Josh Whelan with this Pioneer planting progress update. “So, the west side seems to be a little bit further ahead and parts of The Thumb are pretty good, but the center part of the state has been pretty wet.”
Now that we’re past May 15th, Whelan says growers are contacting him about switching hybrid and variety maturities. He’s encouraging folks to hold off a while longer.
“The reason being is you give up quite a bit of yield whenever you switch to some of those mid to early maturity range corn hybrids, and then we still have a lot of time left for soybeans to go in the ground. So, what we’ve seen in the northern Corn Belt is May 25, or even in Michigan a lot of times we use Memorial Day or May 31, as a good marker for when we should start switching to earlier hybrids. And if we’re in that mid-maturity, let’s say 96 to 102, that goes even further to almost June 3. That’s when I’d really recommend you start looking at switching to some of those earlier hybrids.”
Whelan explains more behind that decision in the full MAT interview below. Contact your Pioneer representative at pioneer.com/findmyrep.
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