Local agronomists ensure Butler County crops meet expectations
Stephen Campbell wants to make sure our farms are strong and healthy — even if that means counting crops by hand.
Agriculture in Pennsylvania is massive, contributing $132 billion annually to the commonwealth’s economy, while supporting 593,000 jobs, according to the state government’s website. Just over 49,000 families run 7.3 million acres of farmland.
Butler is one of several counties that Penn State University’s Butler extension covers, keeping an eye on farming and agricultural trends. Campbell, an agronomist who works as a field and forage crops educator with the PSU extension, goes around to farms in Butler, Beaver, Armstrong and Indiana counties to see how they are doing as summer turns to fall.
“We like to look at the cornfields, we like to look at soybean fields, too,” Campbell said. “Those are two of the more common crops in Pennsylvania and around here. We try to get a lot of different counts from those.
“We plug that into our spreadsheet, and we push out that information for people to know how crops are doing.”
Campbell, along with Erin Cuprinka, who works with PSU’s Mercer County extension, traveled around the region to various family farms Aug. 28, to get a feel of how our farms are doing.
They set out to answer questions like: Are our crops growing the way they should? Are they battling any diseases?
At farmland located along Pittsburgh Street in Saxonburg, owned by the Vettori family, the PSU extension team went around counting corn and soybeans.
The crop educators are very exact on how they count. They’ll take an ear of corn and count how many rows are on the ear and how many kernels are on a row.
“We’re compiling this data, using it to look at the trends of how crops are doing in the area. Essentially, what we’re trying to do is say ‘Hey, this is what the crop looks like in Western Pennsylvania this year,’” Campbell said.
“We always like to compare everything to USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) estimates, too, to see how our crops are doing in general,” Cuprinka added.
Campbell said he tries to provide a report most weeks on how the crops are growing, and anything impeding the growth, such as potential crop diseases or damage from deer and other animals.
“Farmers are always concerned about yield count. They’re concerned about how much yield they’re getting out of the plants,” Campbell said.
While observing farmland in Butler, Beaver and Armstrong counties, Campbell has noticed a great deal of crops facing damage from deer eating the tops of the leaves. He said this is a big problem with soybeans around here.
On the soybean crops, Campbell observed some downy mildew. He also observed some damage created by aphids, but not any kind of real outbreak.
These types of details are important to Campbell. He said soybeans have to hit a threshold of estimate of greater than 250 aphids per leaf, with at least 80% of the field, to apply some type of insecticide to save the crop. He hasn’t seen anything like this around Butler County lately.
The corn, Campbell said, seems to be in good shape.
“The corn I’ve seen around 16 to 17 rows of kernels,” he said. “That’s considered pretty good for this time of year.”
