Corn survey reveals positive sample in DeKalb County. Several weeks ago in cooperation with the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), personnel from University of Illinois Extension, the Illinois Natural History Survey's Coordinated Agricultural Pest Survey and...
Monitoring insect populations. Insect pheromone traps are monitored throughout the growing season at the Northwestern Illinois Ag R & D Center in Monmouth. Pheromones are insect hormones that attract individuals of the opposite sex for mating purposes. In our traps a small...
From soil erosion to compaction to weed management struggles, farmers know best what is may be limiting crop production or long-term sustainability in the fields that they farm. However during this period of razor-thin margins farmers may be unwilling or unable to fit the costs of experimenting...
Field agronomists, farmers and others interested in soil health are encourage to join the soil health webinar on Aug. 24 from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. The webinar will be presented by Iowa State University Extension and Outreach in collaboration with the United States Department of Agriculture Natural...
Webinar: Putting a Value on Sweat Equity On Tuesday, August 23 at 9 a.m. (CDT) the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture will host a webinar focused on farm succession planning entitled Putting a Value on Sweat Equity in the Farm Business, which will be presented by...
Symptoms and signs of Diplodia ear mold. In the past couple of weeks, symptoms of ear mold have popped up at the Northwestern Illinois Ag R&D Center. While most fields have rows upon rows of healthy-looking husk leaves enveloping plump ears, in some fields individual ears stand...
While my inclination is to joke and say that the obvious difference must be that the larger ear was grown in Illinois while the smaller ear was grown in another state (four letters, also starts with an 'I'…..), this isn't it. A estimate of yields in a field full of the more moderate-sized ear (612...
From reports of soybean fields near St. Louis destined for mowing rather than harvest to thick lawns of waterhemp beginning to emerge from soybean fields nearer to the Northwestern Illinois Ag R&D Center, weeds are a major problem in many Illinois farm fields in 2016. What in the world is...
What are we seeing in the field? At the Northwestern Illinois Ag Research & Demonstration Center we are beginning to see some of the residual herbicide activity break, with weeds like giant foxtail and morning glory popping up in some fields. We are also seeing quite a bit of...
When walking along the edges of corn and soybean fields the last couple of days, I noticed many Japanese beetles feeding on both corn and soybean. A lot of Japanese beetles (Figures). Japanese beetle ID. Japanese beetles are oval shaped and have an iridescent...