Project Background

When 2019 corn and soybean planting in Illinois stretched into June, and even July in in some locations, the commercial agriculture community found ourselves in unchartered territory. We spent considerable time grasping for any information we could find on the potential impact this would have on yield and trying to understand what management changes we should expect because of the drastically delayed planting. While the planting date data we could find was somewhat helpful, we did not have any data that provided insights based a planting season that was delayed into late June.

While it may be tempting to write off this year as a fluke from which there are no real lessons to be learned, we may want to rethink that. What we have is a giant, unplanned,and involuntary experiment that is being conducted by Illinois farmers this year that can help us understand the ramifications of how planting date and variety maturity affect overall yields. We have an opportunity to collect a small amount of data on a large number of fields, which can provide some idea of what we can do if we find ourselves in this kind of situation again in the future.

How You Can Help

To do this, we have a simple request: Please share your information with us. We are attempting to gather the following information from as many fields as possible.

1. Illinois county where the field is located
2. Crop: corn or soybean
3. Planting date
4. Maturity rating (corn relative maturity (days RM); soybean maturity group)
5. Yield
6. Harvest moisture
7. Information on weather or management can be added, but this is optional.

Submit Your Information

The information can be submitted in one of two ways:

1. Print the 2019 Crop Planting Date-Yield Survey. Fill it out for as many fields as possible. Send a copy via email to Chelsea Harbach (harbach2@illinois.edu).
2. Complete an online form to report your data one field at a time. You can submit this form for multiple fields by following the link as many times as you need.

Our goal is to collect all of the data by December 31, 2019.

A Few Notes About Submitted Data

• We are looking for data across a wide range of planting dates and not just from fields that were planted late. Did you get some fields planted in April prior to all the rain? That information will be just as valuable as the details on fields that were not planted until mid-June.
• If you have yields from strip trials with different hybrids or varieties with different maturities, we can use that but please specify that they are all from the same planting and field.
• If a field has spots that were drowned out and thus have no yield, either do not use the data OR estimate the yield from the yield monitor based on parts of the field that had good stands. Alternatively, you may estimate the percentage of the field that does not have stand/yield and we can use that to estimate the yield.

Source: Emerson Nafziger and Chelsea Harbach