Jon Stevens says his corn had front row seats on the struggle bus because Mother Nature just wasn’t cooperating. But the Rock Creek, Minn., no-tiller made some last-minute adjustments to get his corn back on track, and as he explains in our Video of the Week, those adjustments likely saved his crop.

“Instead of just throwing all the nitrogen on at one time and then just sitting on the pontoon all summer and thinking ‘I hope we have a good crop,’ let’s put in the effort, let’s work extra hard, let’s invest in the crop, and so then we came back and did a V3-V5 foliar feed to complement the macronutrients that were spread out here, and that foliar feed, do your own reading and research on V3-V5 in corn. There’s many, many, many trials showing that’s a significant point of influence and it’s paying off. It’s very much paying off. We are green to the ground. Some of the old growth leaves still show the damage. I’ve been pacing back and forth. You don’t have to go very deep into the soil and you run into moisture.”

Stevens says he added about an extra 50 pounds of nitrogen on his second pass because a lot of his corn was still playing catch up after a slow start. 

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.