Matthew Pfarr, UMN Extension Educator - Crops, Mankato Regional Office, Brad Carlson, UMN Extension Educator - Water Resources, Mankato Regional Office, and Dean Malvick, UMN, Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and Extension Pathologist, St. Paul Campus The following information was provided during a 2025 Strategic Farming: Field Notes session. Use your preferred podcasting platform or listen online to a podcast of this Field Notes session hosted by UMN Extension crops educator Anthony Hanson. Figure 1. Heavy rains have led to standing water in some fields across the state. Timing of nitrogen applications With rainfall events happening in the region, timing for nitrogen sidedress is a critical topic this week and into next week. There are several corn nitrogen application options available: side dress liquid UAN, Y-drop liquid UAN, sidedress ammonia and topdress urea. As we are getting past V4-V6 target timing for side dress nitrogen remember that there is...
Diseases Last week, the scouts continued to find a few fields with tanspot at low incidence and severity. Weather fronts continue to bring scattered showers across much of Minnesota. Only the northern halves of Kittson and Roseau counties continue to miss these showers and thunderstorms, and wheat fields in that area are showing signs of moisture stress. Consequently, the conditions for developing small grain diseases, including FHB, are much more favorable for most. However, as a consequence of the hit-and-miss nature of these rain events, both the NDAWN disease forecasting and the national risk model might be overestimating the risk for some of your fields if last week's rains kept missing your fields and fields are much drier (and therefor less likely to accumalate the needed leaf wetness duration periods) than estimated by the tools when the tools extrapolate the data from the data collection points to your fields in the coming days. For oats and barley that...