The 2025 crop is mostly out of the fields now, and variable yields mimicked the weather this year. Disease and its impact also were varied across Midwest geographies, in a year when there were major concerns about disease during the summer.
“It’s been pretty interesting,” says Roy Ulrich, Technical Agronomist with DEKALB. “I would say comparing ‘25 to ’24, especially tar spot being the big disease that has come in over the last couple years generally was lower than 24 overall. Now there’s still some hot spots in some areas where we definitely had higher tar spot pressure, but overall, I would say generally it was less than we had in ’24. The yield impact as we started to get some of our plot data in and get some of our data in on some of our fungicide trials generally has been pretty positive. Some pretty impressive numbers.”
Ulrich said dryness at the end of the season limited how quickly the disease could spread, and that minimized some of the yield loss.
He characterized agronomists as eternal pessimists who can always point to the negatives in a growing season. This year was no different for Ulrich, even though his DEKALB hybrids came through again.
“I was kind of pessimistic on what we were going to get when we came to harvest, especially when we think about July and August and what our nighttime temperatures were,” he explained. “Couple that with extremely high daytime temperatures, lack of rainfall, so I was pretty impressed with how our products performed really across the board even in some of those pretty tough areas. You know we had some field averages coming out that were pretty impressive and in a lot of cases shocked me as to what guys were able to pull out of the field when it came to harvest, just knowing what that crop went through. I think it really goes to show the resilience of a lot of our corn products in the DEKALB portfolio today, how much they can tolerate stress, whether it’s from a heat standpoint or from a moisture standpoint.”
Ulrich covers northeast Indiana for DEKALB-Asgrow. Hear additional observations in the full HAT interview here:
