[Crop Note] current corn stage (23 June 2023) at Champaign in IL, USA
It has been a dry day for a long time in Champaign. I arrived in Champaign on June 11th, 2023, and since then, I haven’t seen any rain. All the fields are extremely dry now. Of course, if it’s dry, it would be okay because we can find any GxE interaction and phenotypic plasticity in response to drought. However, there are also germination problems, and they would be big issues for field research. I hope that it will rain next week; I really wish it does. (Actually, at dawn on June 25th, it was raining a lot, and the sound of rain was so mellifluous). There was an 8% possibility of rain on June 25th, but sometimes nature defies probability, and that’s why agronomic research is not easy. During the group meeting last week, one of the graduate students brought up the question, “What is an agronomist?” It was a very intriguing question, and when I was at Iowa State University, the Agronomy department provided a clear answer to that. When I was there, the department had a slogan: I'm an agronomist and provided an excellent definition of what an agronomist is.
The agronomist is the person who is
keepers of the land
protectors of human health
explorers of plant life
developers of bioenergy
confronters of world hunger
I believe this slogan clearly identifies who the agronomist is.
The target harvesting stage was V6, but in the field, the current growing stage is not V6; instead, it is between V8 and V9. Last year, when I was in Canada, the V8 growing stage occurred on June 30th.
