Last week, I visited the rice fields down South. Some observations have been made:- We need to watch the wheel track depth in a couple of fields, as a couple of spots in some of the fields are deeper than we would like. In each case, this is occurring on drive units using 14.9 x 24 or smaller size tires.
- Dr. Gene Stevens at the University of Missouri Delta Research Center has advised that they have seen some brown spot and are going to treat appropriately.
- We have another field that may have brown spot and we are currently reviewing this thoroughly. If we do treat this field for brown spot, we will use between 12 and 15 ounces of Quadris per acre.
- One field continues to run with lower-than-optimum pivot pressure, which is causing fairly poor sprinkler patterns. The flow is lower than we expected, running about 6.1 gpm/acre, which is more than likely too low for this particular field.
- Fertility questions have continued to pop up, so we are sampling more fields by collecting soil and tissue from areas that look "good" and from areas that look "poor." This sampling will provide us with a comparison since there is very little data both for rice production under center pivots and rice production on light-textured soils.
- The yellowing field from last week is definitely looking better since having ammonium sulphate applied.
- As stated before, we need to closely watch the depth of water being applied.
One field is about 3% headed, and several are in early-to-mid boot stage. Some fields have received over 12" of irrigation this growing season from the center pivot.
Valley is coming a to a rice field near you! If you live near Sikeston, MO, Corning, AR, or Scott, AR, come visit us at one of our Field Days in August! Updates and reminders will be posted to the blog; registration is available by phone (402-359-6032), email (rice@valmont.com), and web (www.CirclesForRice.com).
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