The upcoming weekend rainfall (our meteorologists seem assured that it’ll be widespread) should greatly help parts of Virginia that are short on or getting short of topsoil moisture and position us perfectly for a good start to the soybean growing season.

However, with the rainfall comes cooler soil temperatures. Below are predictions for 4-inch soil moisture and soil temperature over the next 10 days from Orange (one of the coolest parts of Virginia) and Suffolk (one of the warmest parts). As you see, soil temperatures will plummet from relatively warm (>60^o) to nearly 50^o or less over the weekend. While soybean seed will germinate and emerge in a reasonable amount of time at 60^O, germination and emergence will be very slow when temperatures dip below this.

Therefore, heed my suggestion and make sure that you have a good fungicide seed treatment on anything that you are planting now or early next week.

Below is the fungicide efficacy chart from our Pest Management Guide. The main diseases that we need to concern ourselves with are Rhizoctonia and Fusarium sp. If in wet soils, Pythium and Phytophtora sp. could also be a problem with slow-emerging soybean. Be sure to protect a slow-emerging crop with a fungicide containing the active ingredients that provide good to excellent control of the appropriate disease.