Soil Growing Degree Days (GDDs) May 1-13, 2020
Kevin Ganoe, Area Field Crop Specialist
Central New York Dairy and Field Crops
I want to share with you some soil temperature data that was not in the Checking the Back 40 just sent out. Again thanks to the folks at NYS MESONET for sharing this data.
Table 1 contains the average daily 2 inch depth soil temperatures for May 1-13, 2020 at thirteen NYS MESONET stations. That average is just the maximum temperature minus the minimum divided by 2.
Table 2 contains the daily growing degree days (GDDs) at a 2 inch depth soil temperatures for May 1-13, 2020 at thirteen NYS MESONET stations. That is the GDDs based on a minimum of 50 °F and a max of 86 °F
We need to achieve 35 to 60 GDDs just to achieve germination and 110 120 to achieve emergence . The goal of Table 2 was to give you some I idea of when you planted and where your farm is how many growing GDDs you might have achieved if you planted corn in the past two weeks. The idea with this data is gain some idea when you might expect to see emergence and at least up through May 13 when you might expect to see germination and emergence. As you can see few field had enough GDDs to get to germinationlet alone emergence.
So patience is called for as that doesn't mean catastrophe just as expected corn is going to take a while under those cooler soil conditions to get going.
Kevin
Soil GDDs 5-13 (pdf; 548KB)
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