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WC Mn/Dakotas | At the end of the day you have pretty good corn. Were you close to better yield? Yes. I will somewhat disagree with most of the responses. Population does influence yield by root and stalk development and subsequent ability/inability for available water/nutrient uptake. Irrigation itself does not cool canopy temps long term, you need proper profile management and then healthy plants determine canopy conditions.
The corn looks healthy and green to the ground. I don't see signs of nitrogen bring short at all, so I would eliminate that. But without a good complete soil test, its just a guess. If you tissue sample, do it regularly and learn how to it accurately for the stage of growth. You need to build a trend of what happens and when, and then you can make adjustments for the next crop to hopefully avoid a problem.
Next I would check 10 plants in a row by pulling some leaves off above the ear to check which position the ear is in. If it is in the 1st(top) location the stalk with be round at the joint above the ear. If the stalk is concave, then ear is in the 2, 3, 4 etc position. If the plant senses stress, it can abort ear development and move to a lower, smaller, easier ear. Each position lower is about 10-12% smaller. Doing this builds a timeliness of when stress occurred. If aborted ears above are larger more developed and stalk has large concave "groove", then you know it was a very late stress. If you can't find evidence of an ear or its really tiny and the stalk has a very narrow/shallow concave groove, it had a stress very early. If you get good rows around, you had good growing conditions early. If the ear is shorter, but filled out to the end, you had some mid season issues.
In your case you have decent/normal rows around, but maybe could have been more (depending on hybrid). My guess is you are a little over irrigated early (may want to look into moisture sensors), but not terribly. Then you have really good ear length. So early and mid season stress was minimal. This corn just did not finish off to its full potential it had earlier (still you have 38-40 kernals). You can see kernels are tapering off vs just quitting at the tip. So this tells me you really didn't have pollination issues. It was more likely you ran out of some nutrients late season. Kernel depth is also very important aspect.
Boron helps pollination and you want that on 2 weeks before the plant needs it. It needs to get to soil and taken up through the roots. But again, you don't really have pollination issues.
Soil and tissue really are the only way to know. If you work on better early season irrigation, you will get a better root system that will come into play later in season. Nutrient placement of non mobile nutrients might need improvement. Sulfur? Need to set things up for better later season uptake of whatever was short and possibly later season fertigation is part of the answer. | |
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Corn ear tip back causes
