As you travel over your field with your herbicide this season, you may be considering adding a fungicide to that pass. If so, there are a few things to think about. In general, early fungicide applications on corn (V5-V7) have not been shown to provide much yield benefit over no treatment (average is +1 bushel per acre). In repeated trials across the country, we see the best opportunity for yield response with a treatment at tassel (average: +8 bushels per acre). However, there are some situations in which an early treatment may be more economical.

Hopefully, most of our full-season soybean crop has been managed for weeds by this time of the summer and some growers have planted or are still considering double-crop. There is still time to ensure your soybean weed control programs worked by scouting those full-season soybeans for escapes and by selecting effective herbicides to control weeds in double-crop soybeans.

This year, there is a very high degree of variability across the state with regards to soybean height, canopy coverage and overall crop condition.

Corn planted in early May under "less than ideal conditions" or pounded by rain is just coming up. There are undoubtedly some questionable stands, but what can be done at this late date?

Herbicides can cause serious injury to plants when applied improperly or when non-target drift occurs. Here are five things to consider to avoid crop injury when applying herbicides this spring.

Slow planting progress this spring has led to all efforts focused on getting the crop in the ground. Often the first operation thrown to the wayside is application of pre-emergence herbicides in soybean. A decade ago this practice could be successful, but with widespread multiple herbicide resistance, it either sets up an imminent control failure or contributes to further evolution of herbicide resistance.

The world's most widely used weed killer is not responsible for perpetuating Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS) in soybeans, research shows.

We've received a few calls lately about options for killing out poor stands of corn and planting a new stand back into those areas. Most of these calls have to do with killing a Roundup Ready/LibertyLink corn variety and planting back into these fields.

Being able to predict when a field of corn will reach particular leaf stages can be useful for scheduling post-emergence applications of certain herbicides and sidedress N fertilizer, especially if your farming operation is so large that regular field inspections are difficult to work into your busy schedule. Leaf stage can be predicted on the basis of heat unit accumulation (aka growing degree days) from planting to the date in question.

As past experience has taught many of us that live in the "frozen tundra," a Wisconsin spring can appear rapidly, so here are a few thoughts to mull over before we all get busy and throw recommendations out the window to get those crops in the ground.