Crop Scene Investigation - 60 Solved: What made the soybeans so fragile and brittle?

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

by BERNARD TOBIN

DeKalb agronomist Sean Cochrane is still puzzled by the brittle soybeans he observed last summer in Tweed. So are his colleagues.

After sharing photos and descriptions with a number of industry colleagues and researchers, no definitive solution emerged. From visual appearance, the soybeans didn't exhibit classic stem canker symptoms, but that's the best explanation Cochrane could reasonably identify because it features brittle stems, by far the most distinguishable characteristic of the soybeans the agronomist observed.

"I've been in a lot of soybean fields and I have never seen anything that would snap off like that," says Cochrane. To everybody's surprise, the plants in the field stood long enough to see a combine and yielded 55 bushels per acre.

Congratulations to Bryan Ward, Williamstown. His was the only correct answer we received by press time. BF