Crops & Comments An Agronomy Podcast for Southeast Farmers

Some growers swear by bearded wheat and others won’t plant anything but beardless. This episode looks at what’s behind the awn on a wheat head: the genetics, the physiology, and what the Southeast data say about when awn type actually pays and when it doesn’t.

• Where awns come from. — Wild wheat was bearded. Beardless wheat comes from inhibitor genes that switch awn growth off, and Southeast variety trials have swung heavily back toward bearded types in the last 15 years.
• Awns and yield. — Awns photosynthesize right next to the kernel, but in North Carolina the yield difference averages under a bushel. Awns help more when grain fill runs hot.
• The deer factor. — In Kentucky and Tennessee trials, deer stripped beardless heads hard while mostly leaving bearded wheat alone. The damage hits between heading and harvest, not during winter grazing.
• The combine claim. — “Beardless runs through the combine easier” doesn’t hold up. Threshing ease comes from separate genes, and some growers report the exact opposite.
• Hay and grazing. — Bearded wheat cut late for dry hay can injure cattle mouths and lead to lumpy jaw. Boot-stage hay, silage, graze-out, and dual-purpose systems largely avoid the problem.
• How to choose. — Pick varieties on yield record, scab package, and maturity first. Make awn type the tiebreaker unless you’re fighting deer, cutting late hay, or planting a food plot.

Your winter cover is already planted, but it hasn’t decided your spring nitrogen bill yet. The kill date is still in your hands. This episode explains what happens to cover crop residue in the soil and why the same field can give your next crop nitrogen or tie it up. We put real dollar figures on cover crop N credits for Southeast corn, cotton and soybeans.

• The 20-to-1 line. — Soil microbes need nitrogen to break residue down. Residue richer than about 20–25 parts carbon to 1 part N releases nitrogen. Leaner residue borrows it from your soil first.
• Two weeks makes the difference. — Rye goes from neutral to tying up N between boot and heading, often right at corn planting. Kill at boot or earlier, 7–14 days before planting.
• Rye ahead of corn. — Move 25–30 lb of your planned N to the planter, below the residue. If the rye got to heading, add another 20–30 lb.
• Clover credits don’t agree. — Southeast university credits range from 0 to 100 lb N. Piedmont field data show corn actually recovers about 36–40 lb. Plan on about 45 lb and check it with a soil nitrate test before sidedress.
• Cotton and soybeans. — Cotton after rye needs its extra N by about three weeks after emergence, not at pinhead square. Soybeans make their own N, so decide their kill date on weeds and insects.
• Count litter once. — Poultry litter spread on a growing cover becomes part of the cover’s N, not a separate credit.
• The honest math. — At about $0.75/lb N, a 45-lb clover credit is worth roughly $34/A, against about $45–$80/A to establish the clover. Plant covers for erosion control, moisture, weeds and leaching. The fertilizer savings alone usually won’t pay for them.

The Real Effect: How Brazil’s Currency Moves Your Crop Prices. When Brazil’s currency dropped about 10% overnight after its presidential election, soybean futures slid with it. Nothing changed in a single US field, so why did your price move? This episode follows the money from a farmer in Mato Grosso to the grain bid at your local elevator, and shows where the trail goes cold for Southeast growers.

• The cash-register effect. — A weaker real means Brazilian farmers get more of their own currency for every bushel, so they sell harder and Brazil can export cheaper.
• Futures vs. basis. — The currency hits Chicago futures, but Southeast basis often holds up thanks to strong local livestock demand.
• Cotton’s exposure. — Brazil is now the world’s top cotton exporter, which makes cotton the Southeast crop most exposed to swings in the real.
• Corn’s cushion. — Why hog and poultry demand anchors local corn bids in a region that has to ship grain in.
• The fertilizer angle. — Brazil imports nearly all its potash, and what a weaker real could mean for spring 2027 input prices.
• What to watch. — Brazil’s central bank decision on November 4, Chinese purchases, and how fast Brazilian farmers sell the new crop.

Tawny vs. Gray: Does Soybean Color Really Matter at Harvest? Drive past a mature soybean field and you’ll notice the color right away: silver-gray, golden tan, or that dark reddish-brown a lot of Southern growers still swear by. The old saying is that darker beans hold up better in a wet fall. We dig into the genetics behind field color and look at what the research says about whether it has anything to do with weathering and seed quality.

• It’s mostly the hairs. — Field color comes mainly from pod pubescence, which is tawny, light tawny, or gray, laid over a separate pod wall color of tan or brown.
• One gene, one pigment. — Tawny hairs carry a flavonoid pigment that gray hairs can’t make. A single gene flips that switch.
• Putting the old belief to the test. — Mississippi State left a variety trial standing in the weather for weeks past maturity. Color showed no link to seed quality, but varieties differed a lot from one another.
• Why the preference stuck. — Popular old tawny varieties carried other good genes, maturity timing varied, and mold-darkened gray fields just look worse from the truck.
• What to look at instead. — Pick varieties on OVT seed quality, Phomopsis and purple seed stain ratings, shatter, green stem, and maturity fit. Then use color to spot off-types.

Why does a Piedmont corn grower have to plant a 20% non-Bt refuge when an Iowa grower only needs 5%? The answer is corn earworm, the same insect that becomes cotton bollworm. It has already beaten most of the Bt proteins in our corn. Geoff and Glenn break down how refuge works, whether it's still doing its job, and what it means for your seed order.

• Why 20% here and 5% up north. — Earworm feeds on corn, then moves to cotton and soybeans in the same season, and Bt isn't strong enough to kill it outright. The Corn Belt's 5% rule was built around European corn borer, which lives almost entirely on corn.
• How refuge actually works. — Non-Bt corn produces susceptible moths that mate with rare resistant survivors, which keeps resistance genes diluted. That only works if the refuge is close by and planted at the same time as your Bt corn.
• The rules in the Carolinas. — Every county in NC and SC counts as a cotton-growing area. Refuge-in-a-bag doesn't count here, so you need a separate 20% non-Bt block within half a mile.
• Where resistance stands. — Earworm is now resistant to the older Cry proteins across the South. Vip3A still protects ears, but resistance genes are already showing up, and that same protein protects your neighbor's cotton.
• Does refuge cost you money? — NC State on-farm strip trials found no profit difference between a well-chosen non-Bt hybrid and 100% Bt corn. Hybrid choice mattered more than the trait.
• What's coming from EPA. — Proposed changes, including requiring Southern growers to buy refuge seed along with their Bt seed, are still on the table but haven't been finalized.

The wheat window is open in the Piedmont, and the two biggest decisions you make this month are when to plant and how much seed to drop. This episode walks through how a wheat plant builds tillers, why the ones formed in the fall carry the crop, and what you are trading away when you plant too early or too late. The focus is the North Carolina Piedmont, with a look at how the guidance changes from Virginia to the Gulf.

• Fall tillers make the crop. — NC State research found tillers formed before January 1 produced about 87% of grain yield. It takes 300 to 400 heat units after planting just to get the first tiller started.
• When to plant. — NC State's window opens about a week before your average first freeze and runs roughly three weeks. For most of the central and southern Piedmont, that means starting around mid-October and finishing before Thanksgiving.
• What late planting costs. — Virginia Tech on-farm trials from 2023 to 2025 made about 75 bushels for October plantings, 66 for mid-November, and 52 for late November.
• Seeding rate in seeds per foot of row. — On 7.5-inch rows, NC State's range is roughly 21 to 28 seeds per foot of row: low end early in the window, high end as you slide into November. The episode also covers why setting the drill by the bushel can leave you well off target.
• More seed won't buy back a late date. — In a Union County on-farm trial, seeding rate didn't change yield at any planting date, but planting date did. That's one season at one site, and the episode says so.
• Hessian fly and aphids. — Planting early raises the risk from both, including the aphids that carry barley yellow dwarf. North Carolina has no dependable fly-free date, so the episode covers rotation away from old wheat stubble, resistant varieties, and when a seed treatment pays and when it doesn't.

Nobody soil tests for molybdenum, and in the Southeast you don't need to. Your pH number is doing that job. We dig into how Mo behaves in our soils, when soybeans actually respond, and whether there's anything to the idea that Mo can protect wheat falling number.

• pH is your Mo test. — Molybdenum works backwards from most micronutrients. Acid soil locks it onto iron and aluminum oxides, and lime releases it. No Southeast lab offers a calibrated Mo soil test.
• Clay vs. sand. — Piedmont red clays hold a Mo reserve that liming frees up. Coastal Plain sands have less to release, and pushing pH above about 6.2 there invites manganese deficiency.
• Why soybeans care. — Nodule bacteria need Mo to fix nitrogen, so a Mo-short soybean looks N-deficient with poor nodulation.
• When seed treatment pays. — On fields limed to target pH, expect no response. On acid, unlimed ground below about 5.8, a low-cost Mo seed treatment is cheap insurance, though it's no substitute for lime.
• The falling number question. — Mo helps the plant make ABA, the hormone behind seed dormancy, and Mo-starved wheat sprouts more easily in lab studies. But no study has ever measured Mo's effect on falling number, and none has tested soft red winter wheat.
• What actually protects falling number. — Variety choice and prompt harvest. Don't spend money on foliar Mo for wheat quality.

They're the yield robbers you can't see, and the only way to know what's in your fields is to go looking before the ground gets cold. This episode breaks down what's feeding on Carolina row crops, how to sample for it this fall, and what to do about it before you buy a single bag of seed for next year.

• Fall is the window. — Populations peak near harvest and crash over winter into eggs the lab can't count. Pull 20-plus cores, 6 to 8 inches deep, in the old row, keep the bag cool, and ship inside two days.
• Where to send it. — NCDA&CS in Raleigh for NC, or through your county agent to Clemson's Blackville lab in SC, where the Corn, Soybean, and Cotton Boards are covering the cost again this year.
• Know which one you've got. — Southern root-knot, peanut root-knot, Columbia lance, reniform, sting, and soybean cyst all behave differently, and soil texture is your biggest clue. Sting and lance want coarse sand; reniform leans finer. Guava root-knot is the one to watch: regulated in NC, beats cotton's built-in resistance, and takes a molecular test to confirm.
• Resistance and rotation before chemistry. — Cotton's Rk genes, soybean's Rhg1 and Rhg4, and peanut resistance bred in from wild Arachis usually beat anything in a jug at zero cost per acre. But PI 88788 is wearing out under almost every SCN-resistant bean on the market, and rotation only starves the picky species — sting, lesion, and stubby-root eat nearly everything.
• Where wheat fits and what chemistry does. — Small grains break cyst and peanut root-knot but host southern root-knot and sting, so wheat into double-crop beans can carry a population straight through. We cover modes of action plainly: fluopyram on mitochondrial complex II, abamectin on chloride channels, aldicarb and oxamyl on acetylcholinesterase.
• The honest math. — Root-knot was the number one yield-reducing cotton disease nationally in 2023, but Southeast trials show fumigation often loses to cheaper in-furrow and seed treatments, and on corn and beans the margin frequently won't carry a nematicide at all. Piedmont threshold data and independent work on biologicals are thinner than anybody would like, and we say so.

We've covered pH and potassium. Now the nutrient that behaves like nothing in a Corn Belt textbook. On our Piedmont clays, phosphorus is hard to build, slow to move, and — on thousands of acres with a litter history — already piled up higher than any crop can use. Geoff and Glenn dig into why that happens, what your soil report is actually telling you, and where the money is.

• Why P sticks. — Aluminum and iron oxides grab phosphate and slowly bury it, which is why a heavy application on a low-testing field doesn't all stay available.
• The lime connection. — Getting pH into the low 6s makes your existing phosphorus work harder. Part 1 pays a dividend here.
• Index isn't ppm — and where the real line is. — NCDA&CS reports a P-Index, not parts per million; compare it to a Midwest bulletin and you'll reach the wrong conclusion. The state recommends zero P above a P-Index of 50, and the real critical level on Piedmont ground is closer to 10 — most fields in North Carolina are well past both.
• The litter math. — Poultry litter runs about 1:1 nitrogen to phosphate. Corn wants closer to 1.7:1, grass 3 or 4 to 1. Fertilize for nitrogen and you over-apply phosphorus every single year.
• Starter fertilizer, honestly. — NC State tested corn and cotton across all three regions on very high P soil and found no response. Keep the rig, change what's in it.
• When the soil quits holding — and drawdown reality. — Those binding sites are finite. Fill them up and phosphorus starts leaving in runoff — that's the chemistry behind PLAT and P-based application limits. Crop removal will bring a loaded field back down, but plan on a decade or more, not a season.
• The actual answer. — Move the litter to your low-testing fields and buy nitrogen for the high ones. Nobody needs to quit using litter.

Potassium is the nutrient where Midwest thinking gets Southeast farmers in trouble. Our soils don't bank K the way theirs do, and the numbers on your report don't mean what a lot of folks think they mean. We work through the soil chemistry, the plant physiology, and the arithmetic behind reading an NCDA&CS report for potassium.

• Our soils don't hold a K reserve. — Midwest 2:1 clays trap and slowly release potassium between the layers. Piedmont kaolinite doesn't. There's no savings account here, which means the crop is living on what's on the exchange complex right now.
• Yes, potassium leaches in the Southeast. — Low CEC means few places to hold a K ion. Add sand and rainfall and applied K moves. Calcium and magnesium from lime actively push K off the exchange, which is why fall-banking K on a Coastal Plain sand is a losing proposition.
• How to read the K index — and why base saturation misleads you. — The K-I is a rescaled ppm number with no CEC in the equation. We run the conversions on air. And we work the math that matters: 3% K saturation on a CEC 3 sand is about 75 lb K₂O total, while 3% on a CEC 12 clay is 300 lb. Same percentage, four times the potassium. Chase the index, not the ratio.
• Some soils physically can't hold a season's worth. — We calculate maximum K holding capacity by CEC class and compare it against what corn, cotton, soybeans, and wheat actually pull. On the lightest ground, splitting isn't a refinement — it's the only way the K stays there.
• Cotton is the problem child. — Roughly 70% of cotton's K comes in by first bloom, on a small root system, right when bolls take over as the sink. That's why you see late-season deficiency on the upper leaves and Stemphylium on fields that soil-tested fine. We cover UGA's foliar K work and where it actually pays.
• Crop-by-crop rates, removal, and litter credits. — NC's actual K₂O equations by index, removal figures for grain versus silage and grain versus baled straw, and why poultry litter K credits nearly pound-for-pound while litter N doesn't.

Every fertility decision you make sits on top of soil pH. Get it wrong and you're paying for phosphorus the soil won't release, nitrogen the crop can't use efficiently, and soybean nodules that never form. In the first episode of our soil testing series, we get into why Piedmont soils fight us on acidity, how often you really need to pull samples, and what your NCDA&CS report is actually telling you.

• Why we test in the Southeast. — Piedmont Ultisols are old, weathered, kaolinitic, and low-CEC. Bases leach out, nitrogen fertilizer drives pH down, and there's not much buffering to hold the line. NC State data show 37% of row-crop samples come back below pH 5.8 — and about 9% are already over-limed.
• How often to pull samples. — Once every three years works on stable Piedmont clay. We talk through when that's not enough: sandy low-CEC ground, cotton, heavy nitrogen programs, and after a big lime application.
• Active versus reserve acidity — and the aluminum it hides. — The meter reads active acidity; reserve acidity sits on the exchange sites, which is the whole reason a pH number alone can't set a lime rate. Below about pH 5.5, aluminum goes into solution and attacks the root tip directly, shutting down cell elongation — short, stubby, brittle roots that can't chase water. Manganese toxicity rides along with it.
• What we shoot for. — pH 6.0 on mineral soils, 6.2 for cotton, and why chasing 7.0 costs you manganese, zinc, and boron.
• Why North Carolina doesn't report a buffer pH. — Most states run a buffer (Adams-Evans, Mehlich, Sikora) to estimate reserve acidity. NC skips that step and calculates lime straight from exchangeable acidity, or "Ac," on your report. We walk the actual equation — and why that means NC's CEC number isn't comparable to a private lab's.
• Buying lime on the tag, not the sticker. — Tennessee dolomite versus South Carolina calcitic, the geology behind each, and why dolomite reacts slower — let your magnesium index make the call, not a Ca:Mg ratio. Then calcium carbonate equivalent and fineness combine into effective neutralizing value, so you can compare two quotes on delivered tons of actual neutralizing power. And gypsum is not lime — it's calcium sulfate, it won't move your pH, but it has a job to do on subsoil aluminum.

POST resistance has taken most of the traditional cleanup options off the table in Southeastern ryegrass. That makes pyroxasulfone the best soil-applied tool we have for stopping ryegrass before it ever establishes. Geoff Reeves walks through the chemistry behind its staying power and lays out a two-pass overlapping residual program built to draw down the seedbank and keep this chemistry working.

• Killing it in the crack. — Pyroxasulfone shuts down very-long-chain fatty acid (VLCFA) elongases in germinating seedlings before the shoot ever reaches daylight — which is exactly why it does nothing to ryegrass that's already up.
• Low rate, tight binding. — It runs at roughly one-eighth the rate of the older chloroacetamides. High enzyme-binding affinity, low water solubility, and moderate soil binding are what stretch the residual window.
• Two passes, overlapped. — A fall application — late October into November — with a burndown partner like glufosinate, followed by an overlapping pass around February to catch the spring flush.
• No water, no herbicide. — You need 0.5 to 0.75 inches of rain to activate it. Sitting dry on the surface, it lets ryegrass through even though the product is right there.
• Where resistance actually comes from. — Target-site resistance is rare here. The real risk is the declining low-dose tail at the end of the residual window, which selects for metabolic, GST-based resistance. Full label rates and zero tolerance for seed-set on escapes are what keep the seedbank shrinking.
• Rotation and cover crops. — Fitting winter peas, crimson clover, or cereal rye into the program for added ryegrass suppression — without boxing yourself in on the next cash crop or blowing through seasonal rate limits.

Late-season desiccation is one of the few tools that lets you pick your harvest date instead of letting the weather pick it for you. In the Southeast, that's the whole argument — a September storm can undo a season's work in a night. But the same application that buys you a week can cost you real yield if it goes out too early. This episode is about reading the crop and getting the timing right.

• Buying days ahead of the storm. — A harvest aid applied at the right stage can pull harvest forward 5 to 10 days, and up to 15 days in the Deep South. In hurricane season, those days are the point.
• R7 is the line. — Timing is the entire decision. Land-grant trial work shows up to 68.5% yield loss from an application at R5.5, versus no measurable loss at physiological maturity (R7). Green pods are still filling seed, and you can't shortcut that.
• Fast versus thorough. — Sodium chlorate dries down quickly on a 0-day preharvest interval. Saflufenacil runs a 3-day PHI. Paraquat gives the most complete burn but carries a 15-day PHI. Your combine schedule decides which trade-off you can live with.
• What a desiccant won't fix. — These products manage green weed biomass and leaf tissue. They don't cure green stem, they don't pull moisture out of the seed, and they won't stop pod shattering.

Stink bugs cost Southeast soybean growers real money every year — but not all stink bugs are created equal. This episode breaks down the full complex hitting Piedmont and Southeast beans and gets into the science behind why some are so much harder to kill.

• How they actually damage a pod — the enzyme cocktail they inject that shrivels seed, drags out maturity, and can trigger green stem
• What your sweep net counts are really telling you — thresholds by species, and why grain and seed beans aren't scouted the same way
• Why brown stink bug shrugs off a pyrethroid that drops its green cousins dead — the biochemistry behind it
• Why redbanded stink bug might be the toughest bug in the field — lower threshold, deeper feeding, and a knack for reinfesting after a spray

If you scout beans in July and August, this one's for you.

Does a Kelp-and-Carbon Biostimulant Actually Pay in the Piedmont?

Loveland's Terramar is showing up in more fungicide tanks across the Carolinas, so we dug into what it actually is and how it works inside the plant. It's a 0-0-4 — which means the potash on the label is a rounding error and the value proposition lives entirely in plant physiology. We walk through the mechanism, the tank-mix logic at VT/R1 corn and R3 soybeans, and whether a stress-mitigation product makes more sense than a full-season foliar nutritional on high-fertility poultry litter ground.

• What's actually in the jug — Biologically extracted kelp paired with leonardite-derived carbon; why the extraction method matters more than the guaranteed analysis.
• Mechanism at the plant level — Antioxidant enzyme induction, nitrate transporter upregulation, stomatal and water relations, and a measured 3–5°F canopy temperature reduction.
• The elicitor question — Laminarin and fucoidans have real defense-priming credentials in the literature, but here's why that doesn't make this a disease tool.
• Additive, not synergistic — Strobilurins already deliver a greening effect, so we break down where the incremental bushel actually comes from.
• The poultry litter angle — Why P and K foliars struggle to pay on built-up soils, and whether a physiology-limited product escapes that same ceiling.
• Piedmont fit — Thin A-horizons over Cecil and Pacolet clay, record-warm overnight lows, and why this region should be a best-case scenario if the mechanism holds.
• Running your own numbers — Breakeven math at current corn and soybean prices, plus a replicated check-strip design you can run this season.

In this episode we dive into the physical mechanisms of how top insecticides take down corn earworms in soybeans. Designed for row-crop farmers and agronomists in the Southeast, this episode strips away the marketing to look purely at field performance and how these chemistries operate inside the insect and the plant. We compare two fundamental approaches: a rate-flexible tank mix of Coragen Evo and bifenthrin, and the fixed premix Intrepid Edge.

Tune in to learn:

• Speed vs. Duration — The critical tradeoff between fast-acting contact knockdowns (like pyrethroids) and slower, ingestion-driven residuals that provide long-lasting control.
• Modes of Action — How different active ingredients attack the insect, from locking up muscles and overstimulating the nervous system, to triggering a lethal, premature molt.
• Scouting Expectations — Why finding live but "moribund" (doomed) twitching worms days after spraying means your diamide or insect growth regulator is actually doing its job.
• Performance Realities — How documented pyrethroid resistance in the Southeast impacts the heavy lifting your tank mixes have to do.

Whether you are prioritizing rapid knockdown for a broad pest complex or extended residual control for caterpillars, this episode gives you the scientific reasoning needed to make informed product selections for your fields.

Did you know that cleaner air has quietly turned sulfur into a yield-limiting nutrient for row crops in North Carolina and South Carolina?

In this week's episode, we sit down with an agronomy expert to unpack the "Clean Air Act effect." With power plant sulfur dioxide emissions down 95% since 1990, the "free" atmospheric sulfur that used to mask soil deficiencies is practically gone. We dig into the inseparable biochemical link between nitrogen and sulfur — and explain why piling on more nitrogen won't fix a sulfur problem, and will actually just drive nitrate accumulation and poor crop protein.

Key topics covered in this episode:

• The Soil Risk — Why deep, sandy, low-organic-matter Coastal Plain soils (like Candor and Conetoe) are the most vulnerable to sulfur leaching.
• Testing Tactics — Why standard soil tests are notoriously unreliable for sulfur, and how to properly diagnose issues with plant tissue testing.
• The N:S Ratio Debate — A nuanced look at whether to rely on the traditional 15:1 to 20:1 nitrogen-to-sulfur tissue ratio, or follow newer research that judges nitrogen and sulfur on their individual sufficiency.
• Fertilizer Strategy — The benefits of treating at-risk fields with immediately available sulfate-based fertilizers (like AMS or ATS) rather than relying on slow-releasing elemental sulfur for a quick correction.
• Economic ROI — The break-even math showing why 15–25 lbs of sulfur per acre is a low-cost investment that pays for itself in responsive crops.

Every March, Italian ryegrass shows up armored, oversized, and resistant to nearly every herbicide group in the toolbox — by the time you can see it, it's too late. On this episode we aim to lay out the fall program that actually works.

We break down Geoff Reeves' October burndown strategy: pairing Liberty Ultra (glufosinate) + AMS to wipe out early emerged seedlings, layered with a Zidua SC or Anthem Flex (pyroxasulfone) residual — anchored with the adjuvant Infuse so winter rain doesn't wash the barrier below the germination zone. Then we get into the cover crop debate: why bin-run winter wheat, not cereal rye, is Geoff's pick for physically choking out ryegrass without overwhelming your planter, tying up nitrogen come spring and most importantly -- simply giving the farmer options.

If you grow row crops anywhere ryegrass is a problem, this is the fall checklist to have locked in now.

EPA just cleared three new herbicide active ingredients for corn, soybeans, and wheat — and they're aimed squarely at the weeds giving Southeast growers the most trouble: resistant Palmer amaranth, waterhemp, and marestail.

In this episode we break down what each one actually is and where it fits: epyrifenacil (Valent's Rapidicil, sold as Empera) and trifludimoxazin (BASF's Tirexor and Voraxor) — two next-generation Group 14 PPO inhibitors built to control PPO-resistant pigweed that older chemistry can't touch — plus diflufenican (Bayer's Convintro), the first effective Group 12 "bleacher" residual for pigweed control in corn and soybeans.

We keep it practical: how they differ from glyphosate, glufosinate, and the PPOs you're already running; where they slot into burndown, preplant, and pre-emergence programs; why none of them is a silver bullet for Italian ryegrass in wheat; and how to use them to diversify sites of action instead of burning them out. If resistance management is on your mind heading into next season, this one's for you.

RNA interference — RNAi — is quietly reshaping how we think about insect control in row crops. The technology is already commercial: corn growers have had an RNAi rootworm trait since 2022, and potato growers got the first sprayable dsRNA product in 2024. But for soybean and cotton? Nothing is registered yet — and there are real biological reasons why.

In this episode, we break down how RNAi actually works, why beetles responded first while caterpillars and sucking insects are a harder problem, what's in the pipeline for soybean and cotton pests, and what a realistic timeline looks like for row crop farmers. We also sort the independent university data from the manufacturer claims — because in a category this new, that distinction matters.

Why are farm managers spraying an EPA-registered biochemical pesticide to force their crops to grow?

In this episode of the Crops & Comments podcast by Field to Yield, curated by Geoff Reeves, we cut through the glossy agricultural marketing to explore the hidden science behind Radiate by Loveland Products. We explore how a tiny active fraction of the product utilizes a highly specific 5.7 to 1 ratio of auxin to cytokinin.

Tracing this exact chemical formulation back to the 1957 Skoog-Miller principle discovered at the University of Wisconsin, we explain how this mathematical ratio acts as a "master biological switch" that aggressively drives root development and floors the plant's underground architecture pedal. We also dive into severe competitor patent warnings to reveal the catastrophic 20% yield loss that occurs when this delicate hormone balance is inverted, forcing leafy canopy growth while starving the roots.

Finally, we break down the real-world field agronomics. Learn why applying this root-boosting trigger during early vegetative stages (like V2 to V5 for soybeans) gets a "free ride" in the herbicide tank, acting as a cheap structural insurance policy against late-season droughts and heat stress. Tune in to find out if chemically altering your crop's foundational blueprint is a scientifically sound risk management tool or just a placebo.

Why does a trace element punch so far above its weight in the Carolina Piedmont and the broader Southeast?

In this episode of Crops & Comments, we take a deep dive into boron to explore the fundamental science of why it acts as the literal "mortar" holding plant cell walls together by cross-linking pectin. We explain the critical concept of "phloem immobility" — the fact that boron is a one-way ticket up the plant. Because your corn and soybeans have no internal savings account to draw from, they rely on a steady supply exactly when reproductive demand spikes.

We cover the specific impacts of boron deficiency on both crops, from barren stalks, "tip-back," and erratic kernel loss in corn, to impaired nitrogen-fixing nodules and hidden pod-set losses in soybeans.

Given the highly weathered, low-organic-matter, and highly leachable soils of the Southeast, we discuss why even a brief deficiency window can quietly cap your yield. Most importantly, we explore the trend of adding boron to your mid-season fungicide applications at VT/R1 for corn or R1–R5 for soybeans. While this timing perfectly aligns with peak reproductive demand, we explain why tissue testing is essential to ensure boron is truly the limiting factor before you spray.

Tune in to learn how to keep your crop's "mortar" strong and ensure your plants have the fuel they need exactly when reproduction counts.

What is Falling Number? Falling number is a physical test (the Hagberg-Perten test) that measures alpha-amylase activity in your wheat. In the lab, ground grain and water are mixed into a slurry, and a machine measures the exact time in seconds it takes for a plunger to fall through the mixture. If the wheat has sprout damage, the alpha-amylase enzyme thins out the slurry, causing the plunger to fall faster and resulting in a lower falling number.

Environment Outweighs Genetics: When it comes to falling numbers, the weather conditions at your specific farm matter far more than the variety of seed you plant. Rain after maturity and temperature fluctuations dictate FN to the point that a single wheat variety can swing more than 140 seconds between two different locations during the exact same crop year.

The SY Viper Question: The data shows SY Viper isn't necessarily a silver bullet for high falling numbers — it tested right in the middle of the pack for FN performance. However, it does possess a few favorable traits, specifically an awnless (beardless) head type that can help the plant shed water and dry out, which modestly reduces the risk of pre-harvest sprouting.

Testing is Outdated — Test Your Own: Official variety testing for falling numbers is extremely limited; the most comprehensive regional data we have comes from a 2018–2019 NC State study. Because multi-year public data isn't currently available, the best strategy is to do your own testing. You can submit your farm's wheat samples for free through the NC Cooperative Extension to be tested at NC State's new Grain Quality Lab.