ONCE CROPS emerge, it’s a good time for early-season scouting to identify pests like cutworms and wireworms, and to evaluate your planter and starter-fertilizer performance.

Check out the weed species you see emerging and make sure your early post-emergence herbicide program will control them — and remember to leave a residual with different chemistry to help prevent resistance issues for all herbicide families.

Glyphosate resistance is pointed out all the time, but we need to be careful not to select for resistance for all herbicide families. Rotation is a good phrase to remember in all facets of crop production to reduce problems with crop pests.

If you’re sidedressing nitrogen (N), get started early to reduce crop damage and ensure you have N available when the crop needs it. If you’re split-applying N you can wait a bit longer, as long as you don’t have crop damage from later applications.

Planter Performance.

Look for differences across the rows of your planter to determine if any row units or attachments didn’t perform as well as others. Check the planting depth by digging up seedlings and noting how their depth compares to your planter settings. Then you’ll know how the planter setting really translates to actual, final depth after the soil has settled in after planting.

If stands aren’t uniform across the planter, it could be the planter — but it might also be some other previous pass you made with a fertilizer rig that could have hampered the planter’s performance. Make sure…