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Cupped beans have farmers scratching heads and pointing fingers
An extension soybean agronomist says widespread cupping has many farmers scratching their heads and pointing fingers.
Seth Naeve with the University of Minnesota tells Brownfield for several weeks he’s been hearing reports of cupped beans that look a lot like dicamba injury in fields of non-dicamba resistant varieties like Enlist.
“The interesting thing is that some of the injury doesn’t look like classic drift, or in some fields it doesn’t even look like it could be any kind of volatilization-type issue. It’s end row to end row, side to side in these fields. Very uniform.”
He says based on the timing of spraying 2-4D or Liberty herbicides, it left some farmers to wonder if the cupping was caused by something other than dicamba.
“There’s a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot going on here. Certainly this cupping looks a lot like dicamba injury, but we know that there are some other environmental factors that contribute to cupping.”
Naeve says hot dry conditions followed by rainy weather and rapid growth could lead to some of the symptoms farmers are seeing. He also points out 2-4D and dicamba have a somewhat similar physiological look on treated soybean leaves.
