January 21, 2025

The 2025 growing season is just weeks away. It’s time to implement what we’ve learned in the past to see if we can improve upon it for the coming year.
While riding with one of my friends a few years ago as he harvested his beans, he mentioned something that stuck with me. He said, “If a farmer is lucky, he has 50 growing seasons.” He went on about how every year represented 2% of his professional life. Good, bad or indifferent, you have 49 opportunities to improve.
While to the rest of the world things may seem static, change occurs constantly on farms in Indiana. Purdue on the Farm may fit your toolbox to help better adapt to that change.
Areas to investigate
Here is a closer look at specific activities for this year:
Sulfur. It would be difficult to attend a Purdue agronomy program in the last decade and not have heard someone talk about sulfur. Our field survey pointed out that 87% of the cornfields were deficient when the corn ear leaf was sampled. For most of the corn crop in 2024, the plants were using sulfur faster than roots could supply it when the samples were taken at R2/R3. While the late-season drought and tar spot left yield in the field, sulfur deficiency also may have contributed to yield hits.
Some studies throughout the Midwest point to the possibility that not all sulfur forms are created equal. If you’d like a 20-minute catch-up on all things sulfur, start with Purdue Extension publication AY-379-W.
Plan activities based on your questions. So, what will POTF do with on-farm research? Some of that depends on you. What questions did you have as you planted, sprayed, spread or harvested in 2024? We will continue the on-farm survey. There will be demonstration plots using different approaches for adopting cover crops.
On-farm trials. There are always bread-and-butter fertilizer, plant population or product trials. We will continue to provide a link for research faculty and farms to add to their work. We also will work with them on multistate partnership research, either gathering samples for the national projects or just our state, such as grain samples for mycotoxin screening.
Plant sampling. Samples we collect help the Purdue plant diagnostic lab become aware of problems simmering in Indiana fields. If Extension educators find a leaf or combination of leaves with northern corn leaf blight, gray leaf spot and tar spot in the first scouted field, they send it in. The same can be said of white mold or frogeye leaf spot. Soybean leaf, root or stem diseases also are shared.
Variety of issues per year. “There are a number of disease and insect issues that are observed every year in corn and soybean fields, but we do not see them frequently in a given year,” says John Bonkowski, PPDL plant disease diagnostician. “POTF samples helped confirm the increased frequency of thrips injury on corn and the presence of thrips-transmitted soybean vein necrosis virus that our lab has observed in routine samples. We appreciate the information at our lab. It helps provide a baseline of all the disease problems observed in the field compared to the samples we received. Sample sent here may have specific issues that consultants and farmers are trying to figure out.”
Filling the gap. There is a gulf of information between published, peer-reviewed publications and an idea discussed over a cup of coffee or in the parking lot after a winter meeting. This is where POTF resides. We could not do this without the cooperation and assistance from our alphabet partners such as the Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative, the Indiana Soybean Alliance, the Indiana Corn Marketing Council, Purdue Pesticide Programs and farmer-partners throughout the state.
So, if a farmer is lucky enough to have 50 harvests, here’s to a positive and productive 2% slice of it in 2025.
Have an idea? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or purdue.ag/onthefarm.
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