Minnesota Crop News

By Angie Peltier, UMN Extension crops educator and Jeff Coulter, UMN Extension corn agronomist On March 26, 2025, Dennis Todey, USDA Midwest Climate Hub director and Jeff Coulter, UMN Extension corn agronomist, joined UMN Extension crops educator Angie Peltier for a discussion about current field conditions, the spring planting and summer forecasts and things to consider to have the most productive and economical corn and soybean crops in 2025. This was the last weekly episode of the 2025 Strategic Farming: Let’s talk crops! series of webinars.   To watch this and all episodes: http://z.umn.edu/StrategicFarmingRecordings USDA Midwest Climate Hub The overarching goal of the 10 USDA Regional Climate Hubs is to talk about recent, current and forecast weather and climate conditions with various stakeholders and to provide research-based tools to help crop and livestock producers to better mitigate risk. The Midwest Regional Climate Hub covers an eight-state region, including Minnesota...

Neal Kittelson, MDA Pesticide and Fertilizer Management Division and Sally Raymond, UMN PSEE Extension Educator Do you want to learn more about The Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s (MDA) pesticide water quality monitoring program without reading a report? Check out the MDA Pesticide Water Quality Monitoring StoryMaps. The MDA has a robust monitoring program throughout the state to evaluate the impact of routine pesticide and other agricultural chemical use on water resources. The MDA’s Monitoring and Assessment Unit produces an annual Water Quality Monitoring (WQM) Report that summarizes the main findings; however, the report does not cover all the results captured by the program. While the MDA and cooperators have over 30 years of pesticide water quality monitoring data all publicly available, this data has not been in easily accessible formats until now. The MDA has developed a collection of StoryMaps to present all the WQM pesticide data in a more accessible and interactive for...

By: Daniel Kaiser, Extension soil fertility specialist While many growers opt for P and K applications in the fall, applying any fertilizer months ahead of when the crop needs it can present some risk for lessening the availability of a nutrient as it has more time to react with the soil. Past AFREC-funded research has shown that spring application of phosphorus resulted in higher corn yield compared to fall application. The next step was to look at whether the same can be said about potassium. Past research has shown that the availability of potassium measured by soil tests does change over time where soil test values are higher in the spring and lower in the summer at points in time where crops are taking up high amounts of potassium. From the perspective of timing, I have not found that the soil test varies in June regardless of whether fertilizer K was applied in the fall or spring. In contrast, soil test phosphorus was almost always less when comparing fall versus spring fertiliz...