What’s the next step for toppled 12' corn you can’t salvage? Whether you endured the derecho, hail and wind or another event that zeroed out harvest potential, it’s time to shift your thinking to 2021.
“Trying to pick up downed corn will only lower farmers’ insurance checks, destroy combines and drive up drying costs,” says Farm Journal Field Agronomist Ken Ferrie.
Because corn went down green, and before black layer, there is an incredible amount of biomass in fields to manage. Your fall plan needs to include how to break up the plants, break down the material and manage volunteer corn.
Life, Death and Recycling
Obviously, you can’t expect microscopic microbes to break down full-sized corn plants quickly. Find ways to help them along.
“There’s a lot of dry matter we need to break down. Try to do it just like the corn head does — into bite-sized pieces,” says Justin Render, Kinze tillage product specialist. “We need to get this residue through that life, death and recycling process as fast as possible, and the more we can break it up the better.”
The sun will help cure and dry the material, but you’ll still need to likely interfere with tillage or other fieldwork. Analyze if the tillage equipment you have will tackle and bury the residue.
“The earlier we get that residue buried, the more heat and time the microbes in the soil have to break it down,” says Andrew Phillips, Channel seedsman in northwest Iowa.
Another option to consider is adding cover crops to impacted fields, which might sound counterintuitive, but could help boost microbial activity, Render says.
Yields were looking phenomenal in many areas of the now decimated fields, which means a lot of seeds could potentially germinate in 2021, Ferrie says. The more down kernels that germinate this fall, the better so they’re killed by cold weather.
You could also use a moldboard plow to bury the ears deep enough they can’t germinate.
2021 Crop Choices
Start planning your next crop now. “If it was a corn-on-corn field to begin with it’s probably your best bet to go soybeans,” Phillips says.
However, if you planted corn with a single form of herbicide tolerance, you might be able to plant corn again next year. To do so, choose a double herbicide-tolerant variety and plan to spray the field with the additional herbicide to control volunteer corn.
