Calibrate Your Yield Monitor – a Checklist

Sep 19, 2018

By David Holshouser

While this post is likely too late for corn, it does apply to other crops. If you have yet harvested all of your corn, it’s never too late to calibrate your yield monitor.

First, I am no expert in calibrating yield monitors. My experience with the process only involves showing up to the farm with an accurate weigh wagon (or we use their grain cart), riding with the combine operator as he harvests a known area of the field, weighing the load and obtaining a moisture from the load (with a calibrated moisture tester), then watch him do the calibration.

Still, I understand the need for calibration although it takes time and may mean looking in the manual to learn or refresh one’s memory on the process.

John Barker, Knox County Extension Educator (Ohio State Extension) wrote an excellent article, “It’s almost that time of year … Don’t forget to calibrate your yield monitor!”, which is a step-by-step checklist of how to do this. I highly encourage all to read it.

We do have several weigh wagons located around the state that Virginia Cooperative Extension uses for our on-farm research. If you want me or one of your County Agents to help with this process, let us know.

Source: vt.edu

Video: LALEXPERT: Sclerotinia cycle and prophylactic methods

White rot, also known as sclerotinia, is a common agricultural fungal disease caused by various virulent species of Sclerotinia. It initially affects the root system (mycelium) before spreading to the aerial parts through the dissemination of spores.

Sclerotinia is undoubtedly a disease of major economic importance, and very damaging in the event of a heavy attack.

All these attacks come from the primary inoculum stored in the soil: sclerotia. These forms of resistance can survive in the soil for over 10 years, maintaining constant contamination of susceptible host crops, causing symptoms on the crop and replenishing the soil inoculum with new sclerotia.