Drought Stress and Pest Pressure Hit Northwest Minnesota Soybeans
You're listening to In The Pod, Soybean Updates, a weekly trek into the latest soybean information from NDSU Extension. How widespread is the drought? The story changes with location. The weather in the Crookston, Minnesota area has been challenging. Here to catch us up is Angie Peltier, University of Minnesota Extension crops educator at the Northwest Research and Outreach Center in Crookston, Minnesota. Angie, what's the story with soybeans in your area?
Angie Peltier:Well, soybeans have been struggling for some time now. I travel throughout Northwest Minnesota. We've only had really one garden spot throughout that region, and that's Northeast Marshall County. It either pours or you get nothing. And so they had an area where it poured. So, unfortunately, there were some areas where they had crops sitting underwater for some time. However, there were some areas that just hit that sweet spot, but the rest of us have been tremendously dry with between six and nine inches less rain than the thirty year average that we always compare everything to. Then we've watched the sugar beet crop sort of shrink over time. While we had closed rows, we don't have them anymore due to drought. And what I've heard locally is some of the smaller producers no longer need to hire help for the main campaign for hauling sugar beets because they don't think they're gonna have enough of a crop to warrant additional help.
Bruce Sundeen:Has soybean acreage changed over the years?
Angie Peltier:I haven't looked at the data, but my impression is that there's many more corn acres this year, and there's more canola acres this year at the expense of soybeans.
Bruce Sundeen:What growth stage are the soybeans in?
Angie Peltier:Some of our crops have particularly if they have been suffering from a soybean cyst nematode infestation, many of the crops have started to quit a little bit earlier than we would have wanted them to, so they've been just maturing due to lack of rainfall. By and large, throughout much of the region, we're starting to see everything turn yellow and having leaves fall. What we've also noticed is that this year, Bruce, we've been seeing much more frogeye leaf spot throughout the region. Now this is a fungal disease that typically, when I think about it, I think, well, you know, Northwest Minnesota isn't necessarily the ideal candidate for the area of the country that should be seeing frog eye leaf spot infection. This disease, like I said, it's caused by a fungal pathogen. It is actually favored by hot and humid weather. And so we had quite a bit of that during that heat dome that we all experienced earlier in the growing season. It's a seedborne pathogen. It's also something that can carry over in the residue from previously infected soybean crops. I think it probably came in on seed this year, and we saw it as far north as Roseville and Kitson Counties, which border Canada.
Bruce Sundeen:Angie, have you had much insect pressure?
Angie Peltier:I will tell you, Bruce, our major insect pest this year was not soybean aphid like everybody dreads. Unfortunately, the other thing that we actually experienced this year was tremendous spider mite infestations. Spider mites tend to hang out in field edges, the grassy areas along our field edges. And when that source of food for them tends to dry up, they look for greener pastures, literally. They do something called ballooning. So they actually spin a little bit of silk, and then they can sort of fly on air currents into our soybean fields. They suck out the contents of individual cells, and so you'll notice a dull discoloration even at highway speed of some of our soybean fields. And infestations start at field edges, And so we saw a lot of that this year, edges of fields being impacted by spider mites. We also saw not just edges of fields, little hills in fields where it tends to be a little bit drier, and then just some fields, the entire field was infested. I think people were sort of deciding whether they had enough of a crop to protect and if the crop was far enough along that it didn't warrant protecting.
Bruce Sundeen:Thanks, Angie. Our guest has been Angie Peltier, University of Minnesota Extension crops educator at the Northwest Research and Outreach Center in Crookston, Minnesota. You're listening to In the Pod, Soybean Updates, a weekly trek into the latest soybean information from NDSU Extension supported by the North Dakota Soybean Council.
