Northeast, Nebraska | Farms With CASE - 8/9/2025 12:14
Who says corn has or had a natural defense to this rust or any other issue? It's very possible rust was never in our environment a decade or 3 ago but migrated somehow. As is the only defense may be fungicide. Or maybe your suggestion is correct. ???
OK, I am not going to argue with you, I am just going to type what I have researched and learned through multiple years of studying this and research trials on my farm. I am not an agronomist, I actually went to school to be an electrician, but came back home to farm and got frustrated when I tried to win the corn growers yield competition and couldn't increase my yields by putting on more fertilizer. That led me into researching on my own and got me down into this long deep wormhole that I am going to share some of with whoever decides to read this. I have not done the yield contest again because the changes i need to make will take a few years to get me to that point. Plus I am not sure if I really want to win it anymore as I believe we should be starting a competition on who can grow corn with the highest ROI but there would be no way of catching someone breaking the rules. I will try to use paragraphs as well as I have been told on here that I need to.
I DON'T BELIEVE CORN HAS HAD A NATURAL DEFENSE TO RUST OR ANY DISEASE. I BELIEVE THE SOIL MICROBE BIOME WAS/IS THE BIGGEST DEFENSE AGAINST DISEASE
First off, Southern Rust is the title of this forum so we will focus on that one, whereas it isn't just southern rust that is the problem and the reasoning we keep getting more and more diseases is probably the same for all of them. This is my opinion, or hypothesis for what is going on. Ok, so first off, southern rust was first identified in corn in the 1800s. It was not documented though until 1941 by a man named Cummins. It is caused by a fungus called Puccinia polysora. It had been found predominately on gamma grass in the south quite regularly. It was found in southern united states, just like today. Southern rust was not a major problem in the United States until 1972. There were multiple really bad outbreaks between 1972 and 1979. So what changed?
So now is a little history lesson. Anyone here remember the 1960s? I don't. It was 20 years before I was born. My parents were toddlers. This is why it is important to remember history. So we can learn from mistakes that were made. The 1960s in farming are known as the green revolution. What happened? That is when new technology really took farming and ag to new heights with new methods and technologies. Better plant genetics came along that could produce better quality and higher yielding grain. That called for an increase of synthetic fertilizers to be used. This is also the time period where a lot of new herbicides were introduced and started to be used too. Tractors were starting to become more common on farms and people could farm more acres more efficiently.
So people started using more and more chemicals, remember this was before everyone was worried about saving the planet, so these chemicals had a lot of ingredient in them. They didn't care because they just wanted to solve the issues at hand. If we spray a herbicide, we won't have to do that second pass of cultivating anymore. Guys were using it left and right because it made their job easier. Same thing happened when we got glyphosate. I'm just as guilty, when the normal rate didn't work, we would just use more of it. Anyways, all of these chemicals are known to destroy microbes in the soil. It is documented in many many studies. The chemical companies just keep coming up with new products that will "fix" the issues their previous products have caused. Notice recently that a lot of the big chemical companies are getting into biologicals? It's the fix for the problems their other products caused.
Soil fungi and bacteria are the soils natural defense to disease. They also help attack pests like harmful nematodes and insect larva. There are many types of beneficial microbes but I will focus on one main one. The one that in most of the soil dna tests I have ran, is the most depleted. Soil mycorrhiza. Google them, learn about them. We don't have many left. Even if I am wrong about the chemicals killing them, the soil tests don't lie that the numbers are very low in most cases. A quick lesson, mycorrhiza form symbiotic relationships with the plant by attaching themselves to the roots. They feed off of sugars released by the roots and in return for that, they go and get the nutrients that the plants need. So plants that have a lot of mycorrhiza to benefit them will be healthier and will actually be more efficient at photosynthesis because of all of the necessary nutrients it needs. The more photosynthesis, the more sugar "brix" the plant will contain as it needs it to keep the mycorrhiza happy so they will grow and reproduce so the plant can secure its food source. The mycorrhiza will then want to protect its food source, so anything that tries to attack its food, it will fight against. So nematodes and other pests are examples as well as other roots from other plants. So mycorrhiza on the same plant species, like corn or soybeans will actually grow together and form an underground community and network and work together to form a city in the soil. The problem is after we harvest, we kill their food source to they have to start all over again the next year. If we do tillage and destroy the soil, we destroy more of what they built. During winter, when nothing is growing, neither are they. some can lay dormant until next growing season. This is why cover crops is a good thing but if a person can't manage them timely, it can be very difficult and costly for you.
So you may be asking, why don't the weeds take advantage of the mycorrhiza? Well, not all plants benefit from them. In fact most of the weeds we fight with are non mycorrhizal. If you have a lot of weed pressure in your fields, I'd be willing to bet if I came and pulled a soil DNA sample from that weed patch, your mycorrhiza will be low or non existent. One of my makers of one of the products I sell did a trial where he split a field and applied mycorrhiza to half and he took a picture of it. In the picture, you could obviously see the side with none applied had weeds sticking high above the crop compared to the side with. He then went on to say that the side that had the product applied had just as many weeds, but they were smaller because the mycorrhiza was actually fighting the roots of the weeds because the weeds won't form the relationships with the mycorrhiza and are trying to take the food source away from them.
Mycorrhiza also help plants become more efficient with water use as plants only use water to bring in their food. So if the mycorrhiza is making the nutrients easier for the plant to consume, it takes less water so you will have better drought tolerance. I actually proved this on a trial with 2 soil moisture probes that were 100ft apart in an irrigated field. I posted the data on here a few years ago and nobody responded. I could have saved atleast 3" of irrigating. The Mycorrhiza also help to get oxygen into the soil which we all know is important as well.
So back to the plant brix I mentioned earlier. The higher the brix the higher the sugar content in the plant, the higher the sugar, the more energy the plant has and the healthier it is and the easier it is for it to defend itself. So let's talk about insects. Insects that love to feed on plants. Did you know most insects that feed on plants are exoskeleton and can not digest sugar? Guys that I have talked to who focus on building everything that I am talking about here and have done this longer than me, don't have insect issues in their corn, they don't use fungicides and they don't hardly have to use much chemical to kill weeds. Some of these guys are killing weeds with 32 oz of roundup.
so the next question I'm sure I will be asked is, what do we do with the diseases that we are fighting. They are told that fungicide is the only answer. That is false, in fact I have been told this year, people are having troubles getting 2 weeks of control with their fungicides. The bad thing about putting fungicides on is that the more you put on, the more your soil biology suffers. There are biologicals on the market that will stop this southern rust, white mold, and other diseases while not harming your soil biome. You just need to learn how to go about it. First test for what you are needing and then find that product. I sell these products and services myself but before I signed on with them, I had the same problems as everyone else and now I am trying to help others fix theirs. My email is good and many of you have reached out over the last couple of years and I am working with you currently and you know what I just said above because we have talked about it. So if you are looking for some help or interested in trying stuff to get a look at it, send me an email. I am only looking to work with actual farmers. We do the products and the actual soil sampling using earthoptics. Thanks for taking the time to read this. |
Southern rust
