It's Bean Time!

With combines busy around the county corn, and now beans, are getting to their harvest windows. The field I was in yesterday was averaging around 72-75 bu/ac. Hopefully you will find some high yields in your fields as well. As always make certain your combine is properly set and get out to check what is coming out the back end of the machine. Harvest losses can be very high with poorly set machines. Also if you are no-tilling remember to adjust your choppers so that you have uniform distribution across the header width. This adjustment will pay large dividends next time you plant the field. Regardless of the crop make sure your combine isn't putting a large amount of commodity out the back end. Hopefully you can enjoy a safe and happy harvest with lots of high yields.

Great year for beans?

This year most of our full season beans are looking great! After a year of ample rain and minimal pest pressure over most of the acres we should be set for some great yields. Make sure you are getting ready to get into those fields. Once 95% of the pods are brown you should take to the fields for harvest. This minimizes losses from trying to harvest beans that are too dry. As always make sure to pay attention to the combine adjustments and check your settings once you are in the field and starting to harvest. Hopefully this year will produce some great bean yields for all!

Soybean Aphids Continue to Dwindle

After scouting the Chambersburg plot again today for soybean aphids it appears that the population continues to decrease. As I stated before we never came close to the threshold, however now that hot weather has hit we are starting to see the populations react with a decrease in populations. The beans I'm scouting are in R6 so even if we hit a threshold population now (250 aphids per plant) it would not be economical to spray. If you do have late planted or double cropped beans make sure you still pay attention to the aphids. Hopefully the populations are dwidling all around, however you still may have heavy presure in some areas of the county.

Bean Pod Motle Virus

Good news. Monday I scouted for fields for bean pod mottle virus (BPMV) and today I got the results, all negative. The fields were located outside of Shippensburg, Mercersburg, New Franklin, and Chambersburg so they were from a broad area. I scouted only early plantings that had signs of bean leaf beetle feeding, so they were suceptible to BPMV. It would appear this is not a threat for now in our area. If you want to find out more about BPMV check out this information from Iowa State.