Fall harvest is a busy time in Kansas. As corn, sorghum, soybean and cotton farmers take to the fields, here are some updates they might have missed.

Get free soil test kit for SCN Action Month

Soybean cyst nematode (SCN) continues to be the leading cause of soybean yield loss in North America. BASF Agricultural Solutions and The SCN Coalition have joined forces for the second consecutive year to promote SCN Action Month, an initiative to provide growers with the tools and information they need to defend against this devastating pest.

Throughout October, BASF will once again provide free soil test kits to the first 500 growers who request a kit online by Oct. 31.

“We’re finding there are still growers who either aren’t aware of SCN or just don’t believe they have it in their field,” says Troy Bauer, BASF senior field technical representative for seed treatment, western Corn Belt. “Soil testing during the month of October is key to this effort. When growers know their numbers, they can make a solid management plan for next year.”

SCN is present in nearly all areas where soybeans are grown and continues to spread rapidly throughout all geographies. Damage occurs when nematodes invade plant roots and establish feeding sites that take nutrients and water from the plant, which results reduces yield potential. Because the damage occurs belowground, nematodes can cause losses in soybean yield without any visible signs of plant damage. Last year, nematodes were found in 74% of the fields sampled during SCN Action Month.

Learn more at scnactionmonth.com.

Sorghum drought response research funded

Principal investigator Andrea Eveland, an associate member at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, will lead a multi-institutional project to deepen the understanding of sorghum and its response to drought. The U.S. Department of Energy Genome-Enabled Plant Biology program supports the three-year, $2.7 million project for the Determination of Gene Function program.

Sorghum has natural resilience to drought stress and excessive heat, which is attractive for developing bioenergy feedstocks for production on marginal lands. Eveland’s project explores the gene networks underlying this remarkable stress resilience in sorghum, and seeks to define the functions of critical genes   and how they are regulated. Drought tolerance is a complex trait and understanding its regulation in the broader context of the whole plant and its environment will require advanced approaches in genetics, genomics, phenotyping and gene editing.

“There is extraordinary genetic diversity underlying sorghum’s adaptation to stressful environments, and we want to tap into this in a precise way to inform engineering and breeding strategies for future climates,” Eveland says. “We have little understanding of what most of the 30,000-plus genes in the sorghum genome do and whether functionally conserved genes have unique control mechanisms in drought-adapted sorghum — this information could help efforts to make other crops more stress-resilient, too.”

The research will focus on the gene expression that allows the sorghum plant to respond to drought stress, using advanced genomics and gene editing methods. The research will use robotic field-based phenotyping at the University of Arizona’s Maricopa Agricultural Center to collect high-resolution sensor data for crop traits. Learn more at danforthcenter.org.

Cotton harvest moving along

Rex Friesen, crop consultant and public relations representative for Southern Kansas Cotton Growers Cooperative Inc. reports that as of Oct. 19, the gins at Anthony and Winfield have ginned just shy of 7,000 bales. “Grades are really quite good, considering the year,” he says. “With average loan rates of 51 and 6/100s of a cent, the main deduction remains primarily due to shorter staple and fiber length.” The average staple of more than 3,000 bales is 33.8/32s (32nds of an inch), he adds.

Much of southern Kansas experienced freezing temperatures the week of Oct. 18, which typically moves cotton harvest along quickly. But the freeze may not have been long enough for some farmers, Friesen warns.

“A hard freeze behaves much like a stout rate of paraquat,” he says. It just takes longer for the cotton plant to dry out after a freeze than after paraquat application. A rule of thumb for growers scouting their fields is if their plant tissue is dead or dying, has turned black and starts to smell bad, just wait for the bolls to dry out and open. But if there’s still green, growing tissue after several days, then that freeze didn’t do the job, and you need to apply paraquat to finish drying the crop down.

Friesen estimates a broad range of yields from this cotton harvest, from 250 pounds per acre to nearly 1,000 pounds per acre.

Farmers send strong message to EPA on atrazine

The comment period regarding the EPA’s proposed revision to its 2020 atrazine registration review decision closed Oct. 7, just as farmers were harvesting their corn and sorghum crops in Kansas. However, the Triazine Network was at work on their behalf.

More than 16,000 farmers and agricultural organizations, representing corn, citrus, grain sorghum, sugarcane and other crops submitted comments calling on the agency to base its decisions on credible scientific evidence.

“EPA’s actions have been more like a tennis match than a product registration review,“ says Greg Krissek, Triazine Network co-chair and Kansas Corn Growers Association CEO. “In its 2020 decision, EPA finalized and published the aquatic level of concern at 15 parts per billion. Then it used an activist court case against its own decision to reconsider the level of concern. In June, EPA announced it wanted to change the level of concern to an ultra-low 3.4 parts per billion. They floated that number in a 2016 risk assessment but never implemented it. They told us this year that 3.4 ppb was always the number, but that was just their staff’s wishful thinking until they rolled out this year’s proposed revision.”

In their comments, growers expressed frustration with the EPA’s lack of transparency and its repeated efforts to implement measures that would end effective use of atrazine for weed control. In addition to the ultra-low 3.4 ppb level, EPA doubled and tripled down by creating an overpredictive model that predicted 72% of U.S. corn acres would be in violation.

The next step is a scientific advisory panel, which EPA has committed to convening to examine the science behind its proposed 3.4 ppb level of concern. The Triazine Network plans to participate in the panel.