What Purdue has Taught me to Become a Sweet Corn Farmer

Coming from a small family farm and learning what I have as an agronomy major has brought me to try my hand at growing a field of sweet corn. The struggles that come along with this mainly has to do with the Indiana weather. Sweet corn is big on having very warm soil temperatures to be able to sprout and take off. After talking over with soybean specialist, even though this is corn and not soybeans, we came to the conclusion that if I want to get an early jump on growth then the best idea is to lay down plastic to help heat the ground after you have planted the seed. Another step that I have learned is in one of my internships, I worked with a talc/graphite product that contains micronutrients to help push better growth and gain bigger roots on my sweet corn. My hope for this is to gain better root growth and help grow better ears later in the season because everyone loves big sweet corn ears.