rrlund - your purple corn

Randy, drove by your field this AM. Corn looking much better - didn"t see any purple color on the plants near the road. Assume that the color has gone away. My best guess is that the corn was suffering stress, and possibly the purple color is a characteristic of your particular variety. Have you grown that brand before?

By the way, you have a bunch of deer in the neighborhood!!!

Around these parts you can always tell who planted Pioneer Hybrids in the early spring. It always turns purple when there is cool weather but straightens out around the V-4 to V-5 stage.

Also notice that your corn is showing uneven growth, but most of the corn in the area looks like that this year.

We had a good percentage of our corn turn purple earlier this spring, but on Thursday I cultivated one feidl that had a few weeds in it and took a tour through the rest. Here's what I found:

All of the ground was sprayed with a fertilizer and pre-emergent herbicide before planting. We went over it with a spike tooth harrow to incorporate it. We used up some old seed (1-2 years old) and then put in the new seed. The old seed tunred purple and didn't look very good while the new seed was green to a light green from too much water.

The feild I cultivated was new seed and had some flood out areas, and where it needed to be cultivated was where my brother was planning on planting pumpkins so it wasn't sprayed with the rest of the feild. The rest of the feilds are all clean. The old seed that was purple is actually taller and better looking now than the new seed. I think it's more the feild and not the seed, as one feild has old seed on the outside and new on the inside.

We were worried about the purple corn we had, but as the days got warmer and a little dryer, the corn really turned around and espescially in the last 2 weeks. Looks great now and I think most of it hit the knee high by the 4th of July. I have seen some corn in the area that looks really nice, but it isn't ours.

I did a little replanting yesterday just to fill in the washouts. We had 1 1/2 bags of seed that was probably 10 years old (doesn't get very tall so doesn't produce much, so we never planted the last of it). I got out the book and set the planter as heavy as it'll go just to get rid of the really old seed. After figuring the numbers based on our 32" planting width, it should have put in close to 50,000/acre. I know that's not ideal, but figuring on old seed and wanting to just fill in the owashouts and still get something, we decided to just hog it in and see what happens.

Also found out that the planter was set much lighter than we had thought, so we feel better now as to why it didn't seem to plant as heavy as we thought it should. Our old 495A just might see a few more seasons now that we figured out a few issues we have been having.

Now to see how it fills the silos in about 2 1/2 months.

Donovan from Wisconsin