Soybean School: When is a soybean plant's yield potential most hurt by stress? скачать в хорошем качестве

Soybean School: When is a soybean plant's yield potential most hurt by stress?

Understanding when a crop is most vulnerable to stress is key to maximizing yield potential. While corn is most susceptible to stress at pollination and cereal crop yield is highly sensitive to stress in the early stages, the most critical period for both making and breaking yield in soybeans occurs late in the growing season. Seth Naeve and his team at the University of Minnesota quantified the effects of stress at different points throughout growing season through a study where they reduced light availability to starve the plants of photosynthetic energy at different times and correlated this timing with yield. As he explains in this Soybean School episode, soybean plants can be quite resilient in compensating for early-season stress that reduces seed and pod numbers by increasing seed size. However, yield potential drops off dramatically from stress during the last part of the pod fill stage, after R4. "I would argue with all of these people that say we have to maintain pods, that we have to keep flowers on our plants, that we need four-seeded pods. It's all malarkey," says the University of Minnesota professor and soybean extension agronomist.  "That's probably why we think of soybean as such a resilient plant. Even if it's short and stubby, if it got hailed early on, if had all these other problems, if we have the right kind of conditions during that late season, it's able to just make really big seeds, and those are enough to compensate for a very large portion of our loss of seed number," explains Naeve. While final yield is determined by uncontrollable factors during that critical pod fill period, he says it's still important to set the crop up for capturing as much light energy as possible, with early row closure, based on controllable variables, including planting timing, variety selection, and seeding rates. "Knowing about the stress just allows us to push a little bit on the edges, and for us to understand why, when we push those maturities a little bit later, or when we choose an earlier maturity and try to get more out of it, that we're not getting anything," he says. Check out the full Soybean School episode above on the correlation between stress timing and yield with Dr. Seth Naeve, recorded at the 2025 CropConnect Conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Website: https://www.realagriculture.com/ Find us on our other social media platforms: X/Twitter:   / realagriculture   Instagram:   / realagriculture   Facebook:   / realagmedia   #soybean #farming #agriculture