Corn Maturity & Drydown

We are at the end of September and very few growers have gone to the field to harvest.  The challenge of 2019 will continue through fall and into the 2020 crop season.  This is a good time to meet with your crop specialist at your fertilizer dealership and get a fall plan put in place for fertilizer rates or line up soil testing if it needs done, so when a field is harvested you can get this work done right away.  With the chance that are yields are going to vary a lot throughout the field this would be a perfect year to incorporate your yield data into your fertilizer recommendation. 

The corn maturity that I have been seeing is in early dent to half milk line.   So, the timeline for this is corn will typically black layer 60 days after silking.  To break this down further, 11 days after early dent the corn will be at half milk line.  It will take 6 days from half milk line to 25% milk line, then another 7 days from 25% milk line to black layer which is at full maturity.  At black layer the corn is 30-35% moisture, and in September it will typically dry at 1% per day and that will lower as the temperatures start to cool down.  From what I am seeing in the fields that I have been walking we are probably two to three weeks from 25% corn, depending on what the weather does in the next few weeks. 

The other thing that I am been hearing about this corn crop is that the kernel depth is short.  With the corn not at full maturity we still have time to put some weight in the ear.  I would expect kernel size to be a little smaller because of the stresses this crop went through and also many growers are planting higher populations than we have in the past and it seems that 16-18 around is catching most ears.  In the past we would have lower plant populations and 14-16 seemed to be more the norm for rows around.  It will be interesting to see once we get in the fields what the test weights and yield will be.