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How drought affects corn production studied

Climate change isn’t just making the world warmer. It’s also changing when and how much rain falls. That leaves more corn farmers at risk of facing drought during part of the growing season.

“A severe drought during the corn reproductive stage can cause a complete crop failure,” Ranadheer Vennam, a graduate student in the Mississippi State University Plant and Soil Sciences Department, said in a university news release. “So understanding corn responses to drought and managing accordingly is critical for successful corn production.”

Vennam and his laboratory group looked at how sensitive corn flowering is to drought and the impacts it has for farmers. Corn flowering is complex. Each individual ovule produces a long silk, which must capture pollen from the tassels above the plant to produce a kernel.

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This is Making Harvest a Pain!

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Harvesting the soybean fields this year feels more like driving our farm equipment through a maze than a field, because of the 13 inches of rain in June and replanted areas. Join me today as I take the reins of the combine and harvest the areas of the fields that are dry. Learn about why we drive around the wet soybeans and the current plan to harvest them. Also, see John Deere's Machine Sync in use between the combine and the grain cart tractor. It's pretty evident that harvesting the soybeans this year is going to take longer than years past because of how much our productivity is lessened due to all the extra turning around and driving in a random fashion.