Cornell University

My last week of work gave me the chance to learn one last crop consulting skill–estimating corn yields.  This information can be very important for farmers, especially for those growing corn for grain.  For some farmers, if yields are low enough they may decide to use the corn for silage instead of grain or they may take out crop insurance.  This year in particular brought with it some extra challenges.  Lancaster had a very wet spring and a dry summer.  All the moisture in the spring made it difficult for some corn to become established and the lack of moisture in the summer caused the corn a great deal of stress which in turn caused many ears to abort kernels.

This is a set of ears I pulled. This is a fairly good representation of what a lot of them looked like this year.

I enjoyed learning how to take yields.  It’s a fairly simple process.  You measure 17’5” along a row of corn and then pull every fifth ear.  You then husk the ears and estimate the number of kernels per ear.  This information is then plugged into an equation that determines bushels per acre.  This process is repeated 3-5 times throughout the field depending on the size of the field.  Ideally, more reps would be taken but time-wise that wouldn’t be very practical (it took me about 15 minutes per rep).  My boss told me that our estimates may not be extremely accurate but they usually are enough to pick out fields with unusually low yields.  I realized how accurate this was when I got a yield of 144 bu/acre in one field and a yield of 96 bu/acre in a field directly across the lane.

On the last day of my internship my boss and I sat down and discussed how the summer went.  He asked me what I had enjoyed and what I hadn’t.  The first month or so of the job was a bit tough.  The days were really long with a 12 hour day being the norm.  That said, it was a fun challenge.  There were a lot of weeds to memorize and it was definitely rewarding once I got them all down.  One of the hardest parts of the job, in my opinion, was determining weed severity, especially when a field appeared to be borderline between needing treatment and not needing treatment.  I tended to be a little overly cautious, rating weed pressure a little on the high side.

This experience as a whole gave me a new appreciation for crop consultants and the work they do.  Just the sheer amount of information they are responsible for impressed me.  Their job demands that they understand farming methods, keep track of fields’ weed histories and stay up to date on all the latest pesticides and application rates.  Now that agriculture is becoming bigger and more intensified it is becoming more and more necessary for farmers to hire a crop consultant.  There wouldn’t be enough hours in a day for a farmer to do his work and the work now being taken over by crop consultants.  Overall, this summer was a great experience for me.  I don’t think I’ve found a future job in crop consulting but I am definitely grateful to have been exposed to such a fantastic learning opportunity.

Recently, my boss and I took a day off and traveled to Penn State’s Agronomy Research Farm for a field day.  These field days serve as opportunities for crop consultants to get CCA (certified crop advisor) hours.  According to my boss, to obtain your CCA you have to pass a standard test and attend 40 hours of CCA training every 2 years.  I decided to go along because it seemed like a good learning opportunity.  That, and it got me out of work for a day…

The research farm at Penn State.

The day consisted of five one hour presentations.  The presentations were as follows:  Crop characteristics and high yields, Vertical tillage in PA, Sprayer nozzles, Stink bugs and other insect pests in crop production, and exploring herbicide differences.  The presentations were interesting but a lot of the presentations were a bit above my head as most of the crop consultants attending the field day possessed a great deal of background knowledge that I lacked.

In the first presentation, crop characteristics and high yields, we were taken to a corn test plot and asked to examine the different trials.  The purpose of this presentation was to address some of the challenges farmers in Pennsylvania face as they attempt to produce high yielding corn, particularly issues regarding early season management of fertility.  This one was hard to follow for me as there were a lot of figures presented that I didn’t entirely understand.

The next presentation, vertical tillage in Pennsylvania, gave a balanced view on the new trend of vertical tillage.  The instructor gave examples of the pros and cons of the practice and then showed us three different pieces of equipment from different manufacturers.  This presentation was interesting as I had a very limited knowledge of what vertical tillage was and why farmers have started using it.

Vertical tillage demonstration.

The sprayer nozzle presentation was fascinating in the sense that I had no idea how complicated applying pesticides can be.  We were given a book that contained nothing but pages and pages of different sprayer nozzles.  The instructor, Bob Klein, a pesticide application specialist from the University of Nebraska, gave a short presentation on how to calculate application rate (also more difficult than I would have thought).  He then demonstrated the usage of different nozzles and delved into what he did and didn’t like about each.

The stink bug presentation was by far my favorite.  We were asked to take sweep nets and go through a soybean field and collect whatever bugs we could find.  The instructor then spent the rest of the time explaining what bugs seem to be a problem this year, how they can be spotted, and how weather conditions and other insects effect the severity of particular bug problems.  I found it interesting how the smallest weather changes or bug interactions could have such a large impact on field insect problems.

The herbicide presentation was interesting but it required a much greater understanding of herbicides and their effects than I have.  There were several test plots set up to demonstrate the different effects of common pesticides and then we were asked to go through and identify which pesticide had been used on which plot.  Needless to say, I was completely lost but my boss helped me out.

There was a lot of information presented that day and I can’t say that I retained most of it but it did give me a great appreciation for crop consultants.  It’s really quite impressive how much information a crop consultant must know and understand in order to be an asset to a farmer.

Now that corn has become too tall to drive through with a sprayer I have transitioned to soybeans, alfalfa and soil sampling.  This transition occurred slowly and for a week or two I was doing a little bit of everything.

The corn fields I had to walk through during these weeks were fields that had been sprayed.  My job was to confirm that they had been sprayed and that there were no spray skippers.  This wasn’t my favorite part of my job since the corn in July is usually 4 feet or taller and not all that enjoyable to walk through.  I actually lost a contact one day after a particularly nasty run in with a corn plant.

My boss likes to have a field’s soil analyzed every three years.  Normally, it’s easiest to take soil cores in the spring when the soil is moist but because he covers so much acreage he had me take soil samples from about 40 fields after the wheat was harvested in July.  For soil sampling I had to walk an entire field and attempt to take 10-15 samples that I felt averaged out to a good representation of the entire field.  For taking samples I used a soil probe and attempted to obtain 6-8 inches of soil in each sample.  I found it quite interesting and gained a new appreciation for how much differentiation there is between soil compositions even just throughout Lancaster county.  Some fields I had no problem taking 8 inch soil cores and others I had to work at for up to 40 minutes trying to find 10 spots without rocks.

I’ve been checking soybeans for a variety of pests.  As the soybeans started to emerge I walked the fields, took populations and took note of what weeds were present.  I then went back to each of these fields about two weeks later to confirm that they had been treated.  Right now I am scouting these same soybean fields for bugs, particularly spider mites.  Spider mites can be detected by a yellow speckling of the soybean leaves.  Usually, when you flip those leave over you can find the spider mites.  They’re very difficult to see because of their small size but if you look hard enough you can usually find them.  When looking for bugs I usually try to check each edge, since that’s where they usually start effecting the plants first, and then do a quick run through the field.  If I do find spider mites my boss usually recommends the farmer spray the outer edges of the field and this is usually enough to suppress them.

One of the soybean fields I scout.

This photo shows and example of what a soybean leaf looks like when spider mites begin munching on it. This image was obtained from http://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/2005/jul/071501.htm.

Alfalfa is my new favorite crop to scout.  I search for weeds as I walk through the field but my main priority is searching for leafhoppers.  To do this I use a sweep net and sweep through the field seven or eight times, count the number of leafhoppers I find and then take the average of those numbers.  This is pretty important because leafhoppers can do significant damage to a stand of alfalfa.

This is a photo of a leafhopper. Image obtained from http://www.aces.uiuc.edu/news/News_Photos/PL/content/potato%20leafhopper%20May%202006_large.html.

That’s what I’m up to right now.  I’m looking forward to learning how to take corn yields in the next week or two and I recently attended a field day at Penn State but I’m going to save that and include it in my next post.

I have a bit of back tracking to do in this first post.  I have been working for a crop consultant in Lancaster county, PA since summer started.  My first month or so working/interning was rather repetitious but rewarding.  The first challenge I ran into was working around Cornell’s late spring schedule.  Fortunately, Lancaster had a rather late spring this year due to all the rain but I still went home during study week which gave me a chance to get some preliminary training before planting season was in full swing.  Once I was home for the summer my boss and I traveled around to farms together for the first week and then he sent me out on my own.  May and June are pretty crazy months for crop consultants as all the corn (hopefully) is being planted and needs to be checked for weeds and overall health at least twice before it reaches 4 feet in height.

Some Lancaster county scenery.

Essentially, this first month consisted of me working 12 hour days, driving around Lancaster county in my little Ford Ranger and walking through corn fields.  During my week of training my boss showed me how to take corn populations and quizzed me on the different types of weeds and bugs/worms we were seeing in the fields.  Taking corn populations is quite simple and I enjoyed learning to identify weeds.  I’ve had to memorize about 15-20 common weed species, this includes both broad leaf weeds and grasses.  The most challenging part of this was learning to differentiate between weeds in the seedling stage but after about a week on my own I felt pretty comfortable with the material.

My trusty little Ranger.

I’ll give a quick overview of what an average day my first month looked like.  My boss gave me several farm files each containing a map of all the fields farmed by a particular farmer and what was planted in those fields the past four years.  I would then go to each corn field and walk through it in a sort of zig zag pattern.  My main responsibility was to identify what weeds and/or bugs were present and how severe they were.  I also observed the corn for any abnormalities but my boss usually double checked the quality of the corn.  I then gave what I found to my boss and he wrote up a recommendation (usually pesticide recommendations) for the farmer.

An example of the maps I've been using this summer.

The form I fill out as I scout fields.

The job can be a bit monotonous at times but there have been a few interesting cases that involved some agronomic forensics.  For example, one of the farms I was at had 3 corn fields with some unusually purple colored corn in spots.  I had seen purple tinted corn at other farms and was told that the coloration was due to stress and the variety of corn planted but this corn was a deeper purple than I had seen before.  I let my boss know and he agreed that it didn’t look normal and some time later this corn was completely dead.  It turned out that the business beside this farm had sprayed their gravel parking lot with a mixture designed to kill plants.  Unfortunately, it rained shortly after the parking lot was sprayed and this mixture was washed into the cornfields, killing all the corn it came into contact with.

This farmer didn't kill his cover crop on time causing much of his corn to be severely stunted.

Things have calmed down a bit now that the corn has gotten too tall to apply pesticides.  We’re now focusing more on alfalfa and soybeans but I’ll cover that in the next post.