Growing Degree Days

I realize it's been a month since something has been posted to this blog, but with the winter that we've had and are continuing to have, there has not been much, agronomically speaking, happening in the past month.  I don't know why I didn't think about this before, but there is no better way to demonstrate this than by using Growing Degree Days (GDD).

Understanding that some of you know what GDD's are and some do not, I will not bore those that do know with a lengthy explanation of what GDD's are and how to calculate them.  I will, however, provide a link to a website that explains it much better than I could anyway.  If you do not know what GDD's are or how to calculate them, Iowa State has a great website that explains it fairly well.  This can be found at http://agron-www.agron.iastate.edu/Courses/agron212/Calculations/GDD.htm.  There is also an app that you can get for your smart phone that will figure it out for you.  I have not used this app so I will not provide a link to it but if you search for it, it should be fairly easy to find.

So anyway, back to my main point, at this website (http://uspest.org/wea/) you can click on the state you are looking for and find GDD's for various locations around the state.  So I went and clicked on one of the stations in Sidney and set the parameters for the minimum and maximum temperatures for corn growth and development (50 F and 86 F, respectively) to see how many GDD's were accumulated as of today.  So far this year, we have accumulated a whopping 10.1 GDD's as opposed to 191.9 accumulated by this date last year.

Of course GDD's are just one way to show why nothing is happening agronomically yet this spring.  Even if we had accumulated more GDD's plants cannot grow if they are not in the ground and field conditions so far this spring have not allowed for much of any tillage or planting.