Case #43: The Mystery of the Stunted Soybeans
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EmailMarch 6, 2025
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Join us for real life cases of stunted soybeans, the steps we took to determine the cause(s), and how to respond to your own crop mysteries (soybeans or otherwise).
The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompassed many aspects of the agricultural industry and offered a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/.
Video Transcript
If you are joining us for the first time this morning, welcome. If you got to enjoy that wonderful slug talk this morning, thanks for sticking around. We will continue with the mysteries from the Field with this Field Craps Mag Ideas track. Thank you to our sponsors, Agri Strategies, LLC. We really appreciate their support. We're able to offer this event at no charge to you guys, which is really nice. I can go to the next slide. My name is Madeleine Slavsk. I'm a field crops educator in Jackson and I'll be moderating this morning for my colleagues, Eric Anderson and Nicole Richie and I'll let them introduce themselves. But we have more mysteries from the field, more getting out into fields and trying to figure out what's going on. I'm looking forward to hearing this. I'll let you guys take it away. Thanks, Madeline. I'll introduce myself first and then Eric, maybe if you'd like to go then. My name is Nicole Richie. I am the Field crops educator in Southwest Michigan and I'm based out of St. Joseph County. Yeah. Eric Henderson and I'm also located in the southwest part of the state, but I just this past year took over the reins as the soybean educator, I've got statewide responsibilities. I'm focusing only on soybeans. Yeah. Today we're going to be talking about a mystery of some stunted soybeans. That's not the only mystery we're going to be looking at. Brush up on your sleuthing skills, put on your detective hat. I did consider bringing a magnifying glass, but I did not have one. Anyway, prepare yourselves because here we go. But before we get started, MSU is an affirmative action Equal Opportunity employer and our programs are open to all. First, we're going to start with some relevant background on this mystery of the stunted soybeans. This happened, a farmer contacted me. This was in St. Joseph County the very end of July and there were some stunted soybeans. It looked like this. Why were they stunted? Well, that's what we were there to find out. Actually, we already had a pretty good idea, but it was just a little bit of field diagnostics. You can see right here I've outlined this area. The area inside this black polygon was stunted and weedier and then outside of it was not stunted. Clearly something was happening in this area that was affecting the soybeans. So some steps to diagnose. This is not in any way like the protocol that you should always follow, but this is something that I do and I want to share it with you all. First, I'm looking to identify initial symptoms. That's usually the reason I get called out there or the reason that I might be driving by and decide to stop, something obvious. Then I want to eliminate any really obvious things. I'm looking for patterns, I'm searching for clues and in the end, if I'm still not sure, I'll take samples or I'll use other diagnostic tools as needed. Finally, it's really important to keep good records so that if you run into a similar problem again, you can reference that. Let's start with the initial symptoms. You all can see here, we've got some yellowing foliage. The plants are obviously a lot shorter in this part of the field. The canopy is pretty thin. I'm looking for obvious signs. Are there obvious signs of disease of insect damage, wildlife damage, weeds, a mechanical problem, et cetera As I dug around, I found some leaves with these necrotic lesions, very characteristic of soybean or sudden death syndrome. That was a pretty good indicator to me that that's probably what was going on. But got to do our due diligence. Obviously some signs of disease here on these leaves. Then we're going to look for patterns. Is there a pattern that could give us a clue of what is happening? Is it in straight lines, or is it perfect circles? Most things that are biological, that are biologically based are not perfect circles and they're not straight lines. Usually, if I see something affecting a field and it's a straight line or a perfect circle, that means it was either irrigation or mechanical problem, maybe a sprayer or a plantar or whatever. That's one of the very first things I check for um, after eliminating the obvious. Right here, you can see that there is a pattern in this really highly sandy soil over here on the left. The plants are doing more poorly than on the right hand side, and basically going from the left to the right, the plants continue to increase in size until they're at a normal size in the soil less sandy area. Now, a note is that it might be hard to see patterns from the ground and we'll have Eric speak on that in just a second. But first, I want to show, as I was talking about, um, perfect circles not being a part of well, generally being a symptom of a mechanical or equipment issue. Here we have an example of a field and I was actually in the neighboring field scouting and I saw this and it was such a perfect picture I couldn't not take it. It's a little bit hard to see, so I apologize I was from far away, but you can see these yellow spots are broken up by perfectly green rings. That to me, I can see that there's a pivot in that field. That is a really good indicator that whatever caused those problems came from the pivot. Here I've poorly drawn an attempt to trace that perfect circular pattern. Now we've got some examples from Eric. Eric, do you want to take over here and explain? Yeah. So like Nicole said, sometimes it's just hard to see things from the ground level getting up on top of the pickup. Sometimes even from the sprayer or the cab, it's hard to see. So every once in a while, if you've got a drone or you've got a neighbor who has a drone, it's really nice to be able to get that aerial imagery. There's been plenty of times I've got my drone license. I've had that for a number of years and it's been real helpful to be able to see some like Nicole was saying, some patterns. Sometimes you can't even see things that are out in the middle of the field. I'll show you that in a second. Nicole said that a lot of times if it's a biological agent, a disease, maybe an insect mites it's not going to be linear. In this particular picture, you're looking at some stripes and you can see some linearity to it. Well, what you're looking at here is white mold. You can pretty much see where those stripes are. But in this case, it was in a trial that we were doing where we had applied a particular product, fungicide to those strips that look a little green. Again, a lot of times, you could see that there is white mold from the edge. But in this case, to be able to see that linearity, am I actually seeing a treatment effect really needed to get up in the drone, especially because it's later in the season really hard to walk in those fields at that point. Here's another example. It's actually a different trial and different fields. This was not looking for white mold or we hadn't applied a fungicide. But in this particular case, all that dead tissue that you see out there is actually caused by white mold. In that case, again, we could see it from the edge of the field, but we wanted to be able to determine whether or not that white mold was going to impact the results of the trial. And you can see it's pretty, I'll say randomly scattered throughout this particular field, for the most part, we felt comfortable taking data from that. Here's an interesting example. Again, you can see it's a wheat field, you can see that there's some linearity to these lighter green and darker green areas. In this case, it had to do with spreader and this particular grower thought that there was a spreader problem earlier in that spring and he just wanted to be able to get a bird up in the air and measure, was it true because I think there was maybe some discrepancy from the company as to whether they thought there was a problem. I mentioned sometimes you can't even really see a problem from the edge of the field. This is a drone image that was taken a few years ago and each of those individual patches that you're seeing, some of them, you can see that it's linear and so you might be thinking, oh, it had something to do with maybe something got plugged in the planar. But really all of those patches that you're seeing were because of vole damage. I'll tell you from the edge of the field, you could not see that there was vole injury, especially as you get towards canopy closure. Again, sometimes you just can't see that there's a problem out in the field until you get up in the air. It could be something like this. You could drop in the chat what you think is going on there. I got a call. This is several years ago from a farmer down in the southwest part of the state, asked me if I could get the drone up in the air. This is a corn crop taken towards the end of the season. But in this case, the farmer actually knew that there was, we'll just say a pest that was involved. Somebody hopped up on something, got on a four wheeler and entered the field right over here. And drove around for a while. I can imagine how fun that was. You can see a path they took and then they exited the field up here. In this case, he was really just looking for an estimate on crop damage. Thanks, Eric. Yeah, lots of really cool patterns that we can find. That's a really good way to help diagnose or at least narrow down what we're looking for. Going back to my case, I had found a leaf that clearly showed symptoms of sudden death syndrome. And we know that sudden death syndrome and sweing cmatote go hand in hand. The next thing for me was to check on the roots. I compared the affected plants to the neighboring unaffected plants. We already looked at the canopies were different. I dug up the root systems and compared the roots and on this left hand side is the affected plant and on the right hand side is the one that was not showing symptoms. You can see actually quite a difference right there, which makes sense because the sandier soils for the one on the left, would be providing less water too, and in addition to having the smaller root system, those plants would be very drought stressed. That was just another factor that was complicating this overall result of stunted soybeans. So another thing to watch for is check for insects under the soil. I talked about eliminating the obvious and checking for insect damage, and there are insects that feed under the soil that or might only be active at night. So during the day when you're out checking on things, you do have to dig that up and make sure that you're doing your due diligence. Another thing is to check soil drainage. That's another thing that could affect plants, whether, um, Water is pooling if there's a hard pan that is not very deep and so it's just collecting that water unknown to you or maybe less obvious. Then also use all your resources, refer to seed tags, planting records, application records, et cetera, so that you are really getting a big picture idea of what was going on. I said that I dug up these plants and here's a close up of one of the roots. We found cysts from soybean cyst nematode. Those are those little like salt or grain of sand looking dots on the roots. That was a pretty good indicator to me that between soybean setode and sudden death syndrome and all of that, it was interconnected. I took a soil sample, and that's step five is collect samples and or use diagnostic tools. I took a soil sample and for soybean growers to send that into the MSU Plant and pest Diagnostics lab and get a soybean setode report, that's free. I took advantage of that for this farmer, filled out a form on his behalf and sent it in. So just a heads up, here are some diagnostic options. This is not an exhaustive list, but if you would decide that you need to be taking samples or photos, where can you send those? These are just a couple of options. I'll talk a little bit more about the MSU plant and pest diagnostics lab. Of course, as MSU extension educators, we're always here as a resource and feel free to send pictures to me or samples. If I don't know, obviously, I will pass that on. But the goal is to get these identified. Just a quick overview of the plant and pest diagnostic lab, we have some diagnosticians, and they really are just looking at things every day, working on diagnosing and identifying specific problems. They are really great. They do an awesome job. You can send in pictures by email. You can send in tissue samples or plant samples or insight samples, et cetera, to get things diagnosed. There are some tips for sample submission. This is all on their website. You can use the QR code to access it if you'd like. They have some good guidelines to help you make sure that you're sending in something that will be in the best form for them to identify. Here, make sure that you take high quality pictures showing the context, the whole plant, a specific area of interest, insight anatomy, et cetera. This just walks you through a couple steps. In fact, there's a whole article 0N ways that you can improve pictures or samples for identification. Just know that those resources are available to you. Yeah. I've gotten plenty of pictures in the past. You know, people will send things either it's not in focus, it's not very high quality, maybe it's out of context. I'm looking at a bug, but no idea what size this thing is. So if you can put something in the picture that shows scale, sometimes I will throw whatever I've got on me, it could be a hat, it could be a key fob, a quarter, whatever it is. Here's an example of some numb skull who took that picture. And it's alfalpha. You're thinking, all right, what am I looking at here? What is it about this? Whatever is in my hand there? What am I supposed to be seeing? When you take pictures, just make sure that like Nicole said, you're getting a whole context. Maybe it's a portion of field like the one that Nicole showed earlier, whole plant, but then also actually get some close ups on the actual thing that you're wanting that person to diagnose. Then finally, step six, keep good records. I'm kicking myself just a little bit because I did not keep good records. Of this specific example, I did. I took great pictures and I kept track of where it was located and when. Honestly, pictures help a lot because they can include the date that this was taken. Now I don't have to remember that or flip back in the calendar to when that was. I can just look at the picture and see what the picture was taken. Pictures will also often include a location if that's something that if you're using a smartphone. That can be really helpful to keep track of information and take notes. What did you find out? What was the result? Because you might see this problem again and depending on how much time passes between when you see it the first time and when you see it again, you might not necessarily remember that it was the first time, very important to keep track of things and have some system. It doesn't have to be super complex, but some way just to make sure that you're keeping track of odd things or interesting things that you find out in the field. Of course, always important to keep good records of any spreading pesticide application, planting, harvesting, tilling, et cetera that is going on in the field. That's so that you can cross reference at the end of the season not just what problems did I see in the field, but also how are my yields and why were they not as good in a specific field versus in a different one. It can be very complex, so having good records makes that a lot easier to cross reference and try and find some correlation. In this case, I only took pictures really. I know that we've pretty much solved this mystery, but just to wrap it up neatly, we had already seen those symptoms of SDS. The stunted soybeans were in sandier soils which backed this up. We found soybean sematos cyst on the roots, and then we sent in the soil sample and what we found was that there were moderate amounts of soybean cmatode. Now you might think only moderate why was it only moderate? But we've got to remember there were a couple of things at play here, one being that the soil was much dier in this little area and that would have exacerbated the effects of sudden death syndrome and stunting in general. What caused this case? I think we can easily say that it was a combination of soybeans cmatote and some environmental conditions that ultimately led to sudden death syndrome and stunting in soybeans. Part of what we wanted to do with this, obviously, there's so many different things that could go wrong in the field. That's not really the purpose of this session here. It was really more to give you an idea of, if I go out and I see something weird, how would I start to diagnose it? That's really the point here. Nicole is doing a great job of just giving you a step by step what to do, what notes to take, pictures to take and whatnot. Really what we're doing is we're doing a scouting school online. Or just doing a quick presentation. But, Nicole, is there such a thing as a scouting school that MSU offers? Yes, there is. I'm glad you asked. Yes. Last year was our first year offering scouting school that was offered in the um or rather in Frankenmuth. This year, it will be offered in southwest Michigan actually. For anybody who's in the southwest part of the state and even up it's in Barry County, maybe even up a little bit farther north than what we would consider Southwest, moving into some of the central parts of the state even. Yeah, please come. We hold the scouting school. We try and keep it a pretty small group so we can have really good discussion. It's a cohort. There are three sessions split up throughout the season so that we're seeing and responding to actual in season problems. This year is going to be really exciting. It will be held at the Kellogg Biological Station. And we have requested some planting of non BT corn and things like that so we can really get good pest identification and populations out there. This is a really awesome hands on opportunity. I'm one of the coordinators for this event. If you'd like to know more, you can reach out to me directly. Maybe Madeline, if you could find the link. I'm assuming it's in the calendar, I guess maybe not. We can get you a link so that if you are interested in signing up, this is geared mostly towards summer interns, but anybody is welcome to attend who's interested in learning more about scouting. So it was held, I'll say up in the thumb area last year. It's going to be more south central, southwest this year. What if somebody's on maybe from southeast or west central? What are the chances that this is going to move around in years to come? That is a good question. We would definitely have to see some interest right now so that we can offer this wide variety of scouting wheat and corn and soybeans in real time. We have kept this at our research and extension centers and really or related like the Kellogg biological station. There is potential for it to move, but most likely it will continue to just rotate between Frankenmuth and Hickory Corners, Barry County, unless we hear otherwise. If that is something you'd like to see in your area, definitely let us know and we can look into that. All right. I think for the rest of the time, what we thought we would do, and this is totally an experiment here, but we'd like to open it up for you folks. You have the ability to drop comments into the chat or the Q&A. We're going to show you just a few different scenarios, similar to what Nicole showed you before with that one location at St. Joe and just get your feedback. What do you think is going on? Here's one example. I'll say we're starting out easy. Get a call from a farmer. And it was in Branch County. The beans were planted, I'll say maybe like the third to fourth week of April. And on May 13th, I came out, and this is what I saw. Number one, it was maybe a little bit later than I was the beans were not as far along as I thought they would have been by this point. But the farmer suspected that it could be herbicide carryover. This is what most of the beans in the field look like. There were some that were a little bit further along. Just off the top of your head, folks, go ahead and type in what you think could be going on here and no answer is stupid. You may be thinking, wow, it doesn't look like herbicide carryover to me, it actually looks like something else. Feel free to put in whatever you think. This herbicide carryover, that was just the initial thought from the farmer. That was the reason for the visit. Also, what you could do if you'd like, is to drop into the chat a question. You could ask, what was applied? If you were the one out in the field sleuthing this, let's say you're the consultant, you show up, Farmer says this, what kinds of questions would you ask to try to get at that? Feel free to drop that in and we'll make it fun. I'll make it like a game. All right. So I got some more answers if you want to hear. Yeah, we want to hear. Okay. I'm getting maybe some nutrient deficiency, confirming herbicide damage, frost damage, spider mites, Callisto slash converge. Another herbicide, another Olivo, another frost, cold weather again, and then herbicide timing, herbicide applied too soon. So those in the chat or in the poll? That was in the poll. Okay. Well, a couple of pieces of information. Let me get rid of that. So obviously we've got some yellowing on the cotyledens here. Growing point looks pretty healthy for the most part. You can see maybe a little bit of injury on the stem here. Maybe who knows what that is right there? Could be some a feeding. A couple more pieces of information for you. Number one, like I said, it was planted maybe a couple of weeks, 2.5 weeks before I actually got there. Just a couple more pictures for you. You can see on this picture here, it looks like there is some feeding. You can see these little shot holes here, a little bit of feeding right here. More of the same. These actually look a little bit worse off. But this comment here asked the farmer, what actually did get applied. I asked not only what got applied this spring, but then what got applied last year. What was the rotation? Turns out it was corn. So what was applied the previous year and at what time? If we're talking carryover, it could be something that, maybe there's some product that got applied with the post emergence application and it was just given the weather conditions last fall, pretty dry. Maybe we just had more carryover than we thought. But as it turns out, chlomosoe, command, which is group 13, metrobusin and stocre. Those were the products that were applied and as the farmer put it, he just barely got it on pre emerge. In other words, he applied it probably shortly after planting, hoping that he actually got these products on before the soybeans emerged because, for example, chlomosoe and metrobusin both can be injurious to soybeans once they've emerged. And knowing that chromosome, that command product can have what you're seeing here. It's a group 13. In other words, it's inhibiting photosynthesis, a portion of the photosynthetic pathway. Obviously, it's impacting the plant's ability to produce energy, hence the stunting, and then also to produce chlorophyll and some of the other caroids. Some of this yellowing. I thought, well, it seems like that was the answer. Took those pictures, also, in this case, I sent them directly to our soybean weed specialist, Christie Sprug. She confirmed, that's exactly what I would have expected to see with those products that got applied, especially if some of those beans were just starting to crack, just starting to pop through the surface. In this case, pretty straightforward, easy to figure out, didn't need to dig things up. Again, in this case, didn't need to actually go back and look at the products that were applied the year before, so Nicole, do you have anything to add or any similar experiences that you've had with this kind of thing? After this one, I would just like to comment. I was impressed by everybody's guesses. I especially love the slug comment because that was thinking 2024 was the year for slugs, right. So using that background information is also really important of understanding the context of each year, even if you're not exactly sure what might have caused these symptoms. Yeah, definitely. Like I said, it looks like there's some feeding on some of these plants and it's going to be pretty rare that you'll get to the field and everything that you see in the field is going to be caused by one factor, one thing. You may find and I'll have some pictures later on. You may have some particular feeding or maybe there will be a few plants here and there that have what looked like some a disease, but mostly what are we seeing? In this case, again, a few of you mentioned ovo, you wouldn't see this thing here with ovo, but ovo, you can see some of that yellowing or even around the edges, that browning of the cotyledons, that's pretty symptomatic for ovo, those are good guesses. Here's another example. This is actually back a few years, St. Joe County, farmer called me out and said, Hey, I've got some alfalfa that isn't looking very good and he just wanted me to take a look at it. He had no idea what was going on. This was really just a cold call. This is what I saw. This is obviously a close up, but you can see back in here, there was some alfalfa in that field that was, I guess what you would probably like to see, a little bit darker green, but a lot of it was this yellowish color. It's a little bit hard to see because this was taken in one direction, so the lighting wasn't exactly the same. But this was actually a nearby field, just maybe across the lane, Alfalfa is doing just fine. You can assume that the rain was about the same soil is pretty similar in both of these fields, but the one on the right, obviously really struggling, lots of yellow. Same thing. Go ahead and drop into the chat or I don't know if we have a poll for this one, but what do you think is going on with this particular field? So while we're waiting for those to come in, Nicole, would be a good time for a joke? Oh, here's my very favorite joke, everybody. What's brown and sticky? A stick. Thank you, Madeline. I do appreciate that. I hope everyone is giggling on the other side of their computer screens. I just can't hear you. But it's okay if not. This is just to pass the time while we get your responses in. You gave it away too quick. I could have pictured about ten things that were brown and sticky. I just couldn't wait to get to the punch line. I really love that joke. It's so funny because when I thought it, you think of lots of things, but I didn't think of a stick, even though a stick would be sticky but not like sticky. You know what I'm saying? Got a few answers coming in. Here we go. It looks like it was sprayed with something that didn't get rinsed out of the sprayer. That's a killer. Sulfur or boron lacking, and then a big gold, I don't know. All right. So good insights. Again, I like the honesty. If somebody said, sprayer or nutrient deficiency. Those are the initial thoughts, you get to the field and if that's your initial thought, and you say, all right, what's my next step? If it was a herbicide issue, you could take tissue samples and take them or send them into a lab and get that analysis done. P spendy. But obviously, the first step would be to just ask what got sprayed here somewhat recently. I did not think that it was herbicide related, so I was looking more towards a nutrient deficiency. My first step was to start to pull some samples. In this case, again, I had some areas of the field that were much worse than others, and then I had this field across the way that was obviously pretty healthy. I took the approach of, I'm going to pull samples for good and bad. I had the good up at the top. This is just cutting out a portion of the soil sample report. This is from the MSU lab. Then you can see on the good part, pH, again, alfalpha we're looking for something right around 6.8 or so. PH was just fine. Those bars going across. Even here, if you're looking at these parts per million numbers that you'll see on those lab reports, you say, I don't remember what's sufficient. In this case, you get this nice little bar, says, well, above optimum, in other words, I got plenty. That's not the issue. Potassium again in that optimum range. The good looking good. Down in the bad. However, you say, well, it actually doesn't look all that much different. PH pretty similar because a lot of times in some alfalfa fields or a mixed field, the pH will start to drift lower, so that alfalfa will start to get thinned out over time, wasn't the case here. As you can see for P&K, for the most part, looked fine. Potassium could have used a little potassium. Probably not at a level that you would have expected. I ruled out soil, but also took tissue samples. MSU does not do tissue sampling, if you were to send it into MSU at this point, they'd probably send it back. But for soil sampling, Nicole had that slide up before about different labs. MSU actually outsources the soil sampling at this point to A&L A&L Great Lakes just over the border in Indiana. They also do tissue testing, for my sampling, I send all mine directly to A&L. That's what I did in this case. Again, I sent it in the MSU soil lab, and then at that point, they were forwarding things to A&L but anymore, I just it directly to A&L. This is the tissue analysis. Again, you'll go onto those websites for A&L or whatnot to look for exactly what part of the plant am I supposed to be sending in? How much of the plant do you want? Go to those labs to figure out exactly what portion or what growth stage. Sometimes that's important as well. This is what I found from that tissue analysis. Again, just based on numbers, you say, I have no idea. My next step was then to go to MSU back quite a ways. You see at the bottom here in 1994, Now, is that even relevant anymore? Well, as it turns out, for tissue, for nutrient analysis and tissues, that is not going to change much over time. Some of these I'll say infamous people that we used to work at MSU now retired, put this together. I'm going to blow that up for you just a little bit. Just focusing on the alfalfa part, you can see, this is what we would expect if it was a healthy tissue sample. All right. So taking that over to the actual analysis, and you can see, well, the nitrogen was low, which makes sense. Nitrogen, a key component of chlorophyll, which would make the plant green. But as it turns out, sulfur and nitrogen go hand in hand. They work together to build those essential products within the plant. If you've heard of research that's been done with sulfur, you know that, well, we actually have less sulfur in our soils over the past few decades for a variety of reasons. But if it's low in sulfur, you're going to get that what's shown Castile out of Purdue calls a highlighter green color to the alfalfa or to the soybeans. In this case, you see the sulfur over here and the tissue sample should be 0.31 or higher, and you can see it was pretty deficient, pretty low. All right. In this case, my recommendation to the farmer was to make an application of a sulfur based product. There's a few different options out there. Some are cheaper than others like ammonium sulfate, that sort of thing. He made that application and a couple of months later gave me a phone call and said, Hey, that is exactly what it needed. Did the trick. Again, sometimes it's pretty straightforward like these last couple of cases. But that's not always the case. We announced the winner. We got somebody who gets sulfur. Really? Who was it? Because they get? Yes, we want to know Alvin sulfur. Good job, Alvin. Okay. 100 points. Nicole, I'm going to let you start off on this one. Both Nicole and I visited this field in Van Buren this past summer. Yeah. This one was a tricky Tricky case. Van Buren County stunted soybeans and really these had been planted at a very normal time. We're looking at the end of July now and they were 4 " tall, maybe. They were very short and just did not seem to have any growth. There seemed to be nothing very apparent of what could have caused that. I went through the diagnostic steps and I didn't really, what is the next slide here? Yeah. We through the diagnostic steps. Identifying decently green. There was some feeding, there was a little bit of this marbling of yellow and green that I would normally just ascribe to a variety thing. It could be related to a vectored virus or something, but overall it wasn't significant or enough beans that it seemed like that was what was causing the problem. Yeah. So, I just dropped those pictures in. Like I mentioned before, sometimes you'll just see things out in the field. On the left, some of the plants were yellowish like that. It looks like it could be a potassium and on the right, you're thinking, oh, that looks weird, could be some kind of a herbicide burn. Almost looks a little bit like frog eye. On the left hand picture, you'll notice right there, we're actually seeing flowers. Just to give you a sense, again, we're in July already. The plants definitely shouldn't be looking like that. There's just a couple of random plants, but most of them didn't have this feeding. Yeah, dug them up, decent nodulation. I mean, the roots were still pretty small again because the plants were so small, but no obvious sign of soybeans cynematocyst or anything like that. Really what I ended up doing was, and there was some deer feeding, but it did not seem to me to be widespread enough to have caused all of this for the whole field. My next step was to contact Eric, who has more experience with soybeans than I do, and is our soybean educator and see if he could make any sense of what was going on. So I did try to go out and educate the soybeans a little bit. I don't know how successful I was, but See, that was not as good as the stick one, but I thought it was good. Yeah. Again, in these pictures, you can see some flowers here and there. The plants should be a lot further along than they are. The newer growth was a little bit lighter green, which is not uncommon. And like Nicole said, pretty much every plant had some feeding on it. Here you can see, and actually all of these, you just can't see the actual bitten off nubs. So The farmer, actually, I visited two fields that were in the same, I say 10 minutes away from each other and they had strikingly similar symptoms to the fields. The one farmer, I probably visited six of his fields and the other one just a couple. But again, pretty odd lot. I mean, so obviously there's deer damage, but we're talking about maybe five to ten acre fields, so relatively small, plenty of, you know, wood lots around. So it could have been deer feeding, but it just seemed like pretty evenly mowed off across the entire field, 11 acres. That seemed a little bit of a stretch. So brought in the big guns, took tons of pictures, sent these on and communicated with our soil fertility specialist, Kurt Steinke, weed specialist, entomologist, James De Decker used to be a field crop educator, still works with MSU, has done a lot of work with deer feeding, sent pictures to him. Really trying to get the experts to weigh in. Just a couple more pieces of information on this particular field. Again, I odd that they were so similar for these two different growers. Both of them had, as I was questioning them, both of them had municipal sludge applied to the fields over the years. One of the farmers, the sludge hadn't been applied for several years and he had had soybeans since then that didn't look anything like this. So kind of ruled out that it was a sludge related issue just because it was just showing up now. But this just gives you a sense, we're not talking about patches within the field. The entire field looked really stunted. Do we have a poll for this one? This is probably on the border of unexplainable. Just based on all the information. Again, weed specialist as well reached out to her because we're thinking about, is there something that got sprayed across the entire field that would have set these beans back. Really tried to exhaust every possible scenario. Again, feel free to drop in some ideas, some questions, whatever you might like to do either into the poll or to the Q&A. We have some guesses coming in. Encourage you guys to really just throw out any guess. Yeah, this is the last one, finish strong. Get creative. Now, we did save the hardest for last. So those last two that I did were pretty straightforward. The one Nicole mentioned, you can see SDS symptoms, dig up a root and you can see soaping cyst on there. But this one really, I mean, I was stumped, hence reaching out to the big guns. Any stick related jokes? It exhausted all of mine. I don't even have any tree jokes. Okay. Are you ready? Sure. We're ready. Okay. People seem to really want to blame the deer, which I don't blame them. We got a few for deer. Sprayer not cleaned out properly again, silent killer. We got compaction or too wet and seed planted too deep. That's a new one. Good idea. Oh, that's a good one. Actually, I didn't look I didn't check that. That's a good suggestion. Because the fields, again, we're talking multiple fields, because the fields had a variety of drainage patterns. One of the fields actually was pretty low, pretty steep decline to get into it. But the farmer said, no, still well drained. Most of this was ndier areas within Van Buren. Lots of well drained areas. So I Um, sometimes you'll see stunting with, Hey, we just had so much water and in that part of the state, we did have a whole lot of water in the early part of the season. Good ideas, good guesses. Actually, you know what before I get to that, Nicole, why don't you finish up with what we found out or didn't find out about this particular one? Yeah, I thought I had a slide in there for that. We did get a good joke that I'm going to interrupt you guys for where the arborist stumped. Oh, I love it. All right. That's pretty good. I'll have to remember that one. What do we find out? Well, we found out not all mysteries can be solved. We heard back from specialists and really there was no definitive answer. Sometimes things just nature is complex and we might not have all the tools or all the information at our disposal to be able to evaluate that. That was the conclusion we reached. I know not a satisfying conclusion, but sometimes that is just what happens. It's really important to still keep good records though, and if something like that happens again, the more data points that we get, the easier it will become to try and find a correlation somewhere in all of that. Let me just talk about this one last thing. Nicole already mentioned there's some MSU led scouting school opportunities that are coming up this year. Another one, somebody mentioned herbicide, maybe didn't rinse out the tank or whatnot. One really awesome resource. If you have not visited campus right at the end of June, every year, they've got what they call weeds date. Um, they've got corn and soybean. I think it's just focused on corn and soybean. I'm just highlighting a couple of things here on the soybean side. Not only do they have all kinds of different herbicide programs just to show efficacy, but more for our purposes here, Christie and her lab have had a what got sprayed demonstration portion to the field. On this right hand side, you can see you know, X number of rows and each one of these is a different technology. It could be in list, it could be non GMO, all kinds of different and you can sort of see signs off to the side. Then each one of these, got planted this way with a different technology, and then they sprayed going in this direction with several different chemistries. Here you can see what they do is they've got this, you know, E. Here's an A, here's a K. What got sprayed on there, and then you, based on the technology, based on the symptoms that you're seeing on the leaves, then you take your best guess what got sprayed, and then you can check how well did I do, in this case, it was metrobusin. Pretty interesting, pretty low threat. You're not in front of anyone because you're on your own for these tours. Um, but it would give you an opportunity to be able to see what some of these herbicide injury symptoms look like, given the technology, given the soybean varieties that you've planted. I'm not showing a picture here, but another thing that they do is at least they did it for the last few years. I'm not sure since DCamba can't be sprayed over the top at this point, they actually had a demonstration where they showed what Dicamba injury looks like on soybeans, but then also a different dilutions. If they rinsed out the tank one time and then they sprayed it, here's what that looks like two times three times. That was interesting as well. Anyway, if you have not been to Weeds Day, I highly encourage you to go at least once. A lot of good information shared there. Nicole, any last minute, insights that you've gained over the past year or before that with potato, but scouting in general. Just really important to actually be out there and seeing what is happening in your field. A lot of things can be caught really early and will look different from how they would look if you let them go longer, so that can add another complexity of identification. But that's what we've got for today. As always, you can reach out to any of us with questions or help troubleshooting, whatever problems you're coming up against in the field.