Soybean, corn growers urged to scout for disease threats after harvest

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November 12, 2025

Kansas farmers wrapping up harvest season are being urged to stay alert to crop diseases that could impact next year’s yields, according to Rodrigo Onofre, row crop plant pathologist with K-State Extension.

For soybean producers, the primary concern remains the soybean cyst nematode (SCN) — a microscopic pest responsible for the greatest yield losses in U.S. soybeans.

“The soybean cyst nematode is the number one yield-limiting pathogen of soybeans,” Onofre said. “In Kansas, we’re seeing high levels of SCN, especially in central Kansas.”

The nematode has now been identified in 64 Kansas counties, accounting for more than 85% of the state’s soybean production. Because it often causes no visible symptoms during the growing season, Onofre said it can silently rob producers of 2 to 10 bushels per acre.

“It’s a difficult pathogen to identify in the field,” he said. “Sometimes we don’t even see it during the year, but then the harvested crop is lower than usual.”

Onofre recommends testing fields for SCN soon after harvest when soil conditions are good for sampling. “It’s going to be easier for you to collect those samples and start planning for next year — either for a better variety, a rotation, or even a seed treatment, depending on your levels,” he said.

Samples can be sent to the K-State Plant Diagnostic Lab in Manhattan, or producers can contact their local extension agent for help submitting soil samples.

Corn growers, meanwhile, face increasing challenges from tar spot — a fungal disease that has expanded its reach across Kansas in recent years.

“Tar spot has been in Kansas for three or four seasons now,” Onofre said. “We’ve seen it move toward the western and central parts of the state. That worries me a little bit because those were late-season detections.”

The disease has been especially active in northeast Kansas, but recent reports in Lincoln and Smith counties mark its westward spread. Western Kansas’ reliance on irrigation, coupled with cooler fall temperatures, can create ideal conditions for the disease to thrive.

“Producers should still be scouting for tar spot, but consider adding a corn hybrid that is resistant to tar spot,” Onofre said. “Through resistance alone, we can see yield benefits of up to 10 bushels compared to susceptible hybrids.”

He advised producers to watch for black lesions that resemble insect droppings but don’t rub off the leaf surface. Crop rotation offers limited protection, he added, so hybrid selection remains the best long-term defense. In-season fungicides may also provide benefits.

This fall’s wetter-than-average weather has also increased the risk of corn ear rots, including Diplodia, Gibberella and Aspergillus.

“Moisture is a good thing, but it brings humidity and lower temperatures, which are ideal conditions for moldy ears and potential mycotoxins,” Onofre said.

Diplodia ear rot does not produce mycotoxins, but Gibberella does — posing risks to livestock if infected corn is fed as grain or silage.

For assistance in identifying diseases in corn or soybeans, growers can contact their local extension office or the K-State Plant Diagnostic Lab at 785-532-6176 or [email protected].

PAT MELGARES
K-State Extension news service

Sly harvest trucker

By

Milo Yield

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November 12, 2025

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This is a true harvest truck driver story from decades ago. A 60-something farmer used his seniority on his farm to claim the job as harvest truck driver, while all the younger members of his harvest crew were assigned the sweaty, itchy, boring jobs.

Now, this farmer, ol’ “Poppa” Topp, liked two thing about harvest truck driving. One, he could have someone in the cab of his truck to keep him company and listen to his constant chatter. And, two, he could drink beer on the job and not have to worry about wrecking the combine. Poppa, apparently, saw no danger or hypocrisy in drinking beer and driving the truck back and forth to the grain elevator. But, remember, this was back in the days of more lenient driving laws.

On the day of this story, Poppa asked a 9-year-old neighbor’s son to ride with him to the elevator. On the way back to the field from dumping the grain at the elevator, Poppa stopped in front of a local bar and grill, handed some money to the kid, and instructed his youthful passenger to “go inside and buy me a six-pack of cold Hamm’s beer.”

The innocent kid went inside, climbed up on a tall bar stool and said to the barkeep, “Gimme a cold six-pack of Hamm’s.”

The barkeep, who didn’t recognize the kid, replied, “Son, you’re way to young for me to sell you beer.”

The kid replied, “Oh, it ain’t for me. It’s for Poppa Topp.”

“Oh, well,” replied the barkeep. That’s different. Sure. Here’s your beer.”

When the kid returned to the truck, he handed the six-pack to Poppa, who quickly took a cold can from the package, snapped it open and took a long, cold satisfying draw.

Then he shoved the rest of the cold-six pack under the truck seat and took out the remnants of a hot six-pack of Hamm’s, smiled at the kid, and said slyly, “We’ll give these cans to the crew when we get back to the field. Keep your mouth shut about the cold ones.”

And, that’s what happened.

***

On occasion, I get to have very interesting conversations with dedicated column readers. The most recent wuz a phone conversation with a 96-year-old reader, ol’ Bitsan Rowells, from close to Greeley, Colorado.

Bitsan liked some of my recent columns about Old Iron and had an old-iron story to share. He said he graduated from high school in 1947 and his first job was working for a farmer near Holly, Colo., who owned land on both sides of the the Kansas/Colorado border.

The story he told wuz that the farmer bought a 15-foot one-way disk, but he didn’t have a big enuf tractor to pull it. However, he did own two John Deere model 30s, one with an electric starter and one with a crank starter.

So, the farmer got creative and engineered himself a more powerful tractor. He took the front tires and axle from the crank tractor and somehow welded the rest of the tractor to the rear of the electric-start tractor. Then he hooked the one-way to the hitch of the rear tractor, put it into a desired gear, and then started the front tractor, and put it into the same gear as the rear tractor.

Then he put Bitsan in the seat of the front tractor and Bitsan started driving. The pulling immediately started the rear tractor and away he went with the dual-tractor rig.

Bitsan told me that the dual-tractors had plenty of power to pull the one-way, but turning them around was problematic. It wuz unwieldy, to say the least. But, Bitsan said he got all the land tilled with the innovative rig.

We ended our conversation with Bitsan telling me that later in his life he began making bits and spur for folks with horses. Then he started collecting bits and spurs and has put together a nice collection. All in all, it wuz a very pleasant conversation.

***

Living in today’s U.S.A. can make a person gnash his/her teeth. Three things that bug me are the government shutdown, the ever-growing intrusion of big government into our personal lives, and disfunction in our educational system.

So, I did what I often do. I wrote three limericks about the situation. Here they are:

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Our Congress is broken — I stress —

And gotten our country in a mess.

It shut the government down,

And promptly left town,

And left us voters under duress.

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Our Founders sought limited government.

Personal independence was their intent.

Now our bureaucracy rages,

And has created 175,000 pages,

Of rules and regs, sadly, with our consent.

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Our education system is quite numbed.

And, to “money’s the answer” succumbed.

Yet, the more money we send,

For our schools to spend.

Declining test scores leave us all bummed.

***

Words of wisdom for the week, after all the recent election results have been tallied, come from former Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis. He said: “The most important office, and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen.”

Wise words, indeed. Have a wonderful fall week.

The Burn Unit

By

Lee Pitts

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November 11, 2025

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I hate to admit this but of the 11 books I’ve written the second best seller was a cookbook… and I CAN’T COOK!

Oh sure, I can push the numbers on a microwave and I know my way around a can opener. I know the recipe for ice cubes and I’m quite good at making them. I can make Campbell’s soup and it only boils over the pan about half the time. There are even some frozen dinners I can make without the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms going off. I burn the salad and can never adjust the toaster right and that’s why we keep a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. If I try anything any more complicated even the hogs we raised wouldn’t eat it. Having said all that there are people who have eaten my cooking and have gone on to lead normal and mostly healthy lives.

I should know how to cook because my mom was a great cook but I think I inherited my grandma’s cooking gene. She was a very talented singer and musician but she never learned how to cook from her mother because they had a live-in maid who did all the cooking. So Grandma always burned the bacon until it became elemental carbon and that’s why we called her kitchen the “burn unit.” Her biscuits were known far and wide as “sinkers” and she had to get help lifting them out of the oven. The white gravy she made for chicken fried steak tasted like the library paste you tasted in kindergarten. You had two choices of how you wanted your eggs: black or brown. At grandma’s house we prayed AFTER the meal asking God to not let us all die from food poisoning. Her cooking was the reason Grandpa was so thin he had to run through a shower twice to get wet.

As for me, for 33 years now I can hardly eat anything and I eat the exact same thing every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. For ten years of my life I lived on cans of Ensure and I think that destroyed all my taste buds and that’s why my cooking always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Now I live mostly on potatoes, noodles and soup so learning how to cook would be a huge waste of time. But there was a time 50 years ago that I wanted to learn how to be a cook because in reading the want-ads I learned that being a cook on a ranch paid more than being a cowboy. But I guarantee if I went out with the chuckwagon as a cookie it would have been known as the upchuck wagon.

Not knowing how to cook became a real problem for me in college when I shared an apartment with three other roommates and each us had to take one week a month cooking supper. After the first meal I prepared one roommate sent his food back, another staggered and collapsed on the couch and yet another spent the night in the bathroom with my Hamburger Helper heaving out both ends. Even the garbage disposal got ulcers. So we all agreed I would trade and do dishes two weeks a month and leave the cooking to the guys who actually knew how to do it.

As a kid I often had to make my own lunch and my favorite recipe was a minute steak covered with Hormel chili beans. And I made a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich, although my wife says instead of a “PBJ” mine was actually a “PBBJ” sandwich because I made it with peanut butter on one piece of bread, jelly on the other and both sides were slathered with butter. This horrifies my wife who says that using butter on a PBJ is akin to putting ketchup on vanilla ice cream.

I absolutely love brownies but I could never make them because it required cracking open an egg and I HATE EGGS. Actually, my I Hate Chicken Cookbook should have been called The I Hate Eggs Cookbook and just the thought of someone breaking open the yellow yolk of an egg over a perfectly good pancake or mixing it in with delicious hash browns is enough to send me into cardiac arrest or anaphylactic shock.

Just a Little Light: Dick, Harry, and the Racoon

By

Dawn Phelps

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November 11, 2025

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Dawn Phelps
Columnist

I recently wrote about our little town with its own Tom, Dick, and Harry, and this story is about Harry, Dick, and a raccoon. Harry told my husband Tom and me about it a couple of years ago after we took him to Longford to the Coachlight Restaurant for his birthday.

After a yummy buffet, as we were driving toward home on the blacktop a few miles north of Longford, Harry said, “Oh, this is about where Dick hit a raccoon when I was a kid.” Then he proceeded to tell us their adventure.

Harry said that his older brother Dick was the driver and that he thought Butch Demars was in the front seat with Dick. Harry said that Butch said, “Hey, go back and get that coon—I want to skin him out.”

Harry said that he, Dick, and Butch were not the only ones in the vehicle, that there were other kids. He said he thought that Dick, their baseball coach, may have been driving the team to Longford to a play a game, but he could not remember for sure.

Anyway, Harry said Dick turned their ’53 (or ’55) Desoto station wagon around, and they went back to get the raccoon. They put the raccoon in the back of the station wagon, and off they went. And they soon turned west on the Oak Hill Road.

It wasn’t long until things changed in the very back of that ole station wagon! Harry said that “barking and growling” sounds were coming from behind the back seat where Harry and some other boys were sitting.

Harry said that the raccoon had awakened and was “really upset.” He said the coon had decided that he “really hated humans” and that “there were several humans” in the station wagon.

Consequently, Dick pulled the station wagon to the side of the road. Then, Harry said, “Everybody started piling out.” Harry said that, at first, he kind of hesitated to scramble out of the car, that he really did not feel very scared. But since everybody else piled out, he got out too.

Tom and I asked Harry how old he was at the time. Harry said he was not sure, but he was “maybe 6-7 or maybe 4th grade.” He did not remember his age but said that Fred Demars and Brad Williams might have been along.

Tom, Harry, and I had a good laugh about the raccoon that was supposed to have been dead but came alive and gave everybody a scare!

I later talked to Dick about his memories of the incident—Dick is about nine to ten years older than Harry. Here is Dick’s story.

Dick said he was the coach for Harry’s Pee Wee baseball team; Dick was about 18 at the time. He said he had taken several of the boys to Longford to the rodeo in their 1953 Desoto station wagon. (It was a nice thing for an older brother/coach to do for the younger baseball players.)

Dick said that he did not hit the raccoon, that it had already been hit when they came along. But they did stop, pick up the raccoon, and put him in the back of the station wagon so Butch could take it home and skin it out.

He totally agreed with Harry about how unhappy the raccoon was when he woke up in the back of the vehicle. He said that the raccoon “was really squealing and growling” and that they had “all bailed out!” leaving the growling raccoon in the station wagon alone.

Dick said they opened the tailgate, but the coon refused to leave. Instead, somehow, the coon got under the front seat of the vehicle, perhaps while everybody else was bailing out. Since coons can even climb trees, it would have been easy for him to get from the back of the station wagon and get under the front seat!

Despite his “squealing and growling,” with some poking, prodding, and encouragement, the angry rascal finally crawled out of the station wagon too. Then Dick and all the kids “piled back into the car,” according to Harry, and headed on home. I asked Dick if they let the coon go, and Dick said yes, “that coon took off!”

Hearing Harry and Dick talk about their memories of the revived raccoon brought back a critter memory of my daddy fighting and killing a rattle snake in the dark one night in Tennessee. While us young kids sat in the Jeep, watching the snake repeatedly strike at our dad, it was a very scary time, but my dad won! But that’s another story.

Perhaps you too have revisited a particular location that brought back a vivid critter memory from your younger years. Last Sunday Tom and I drove past where “the coon story” had taken place. Again, we remembered and laughed at the Dick, Harry and the Racoon story!

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