Best Practices For Soybean Scouting

Jul 29, 2015

From United Soybean Board

Proper crop scouting provides invaluable information farmers can use to make informed decisions to protect yield and quality in their fields. Getting that information requires a plan for how and when to monitor your fields.

Before entering the field, it’s important to have a plan. Farmers are encouraged to map out their route in a way that provides coverage of all field zones, usually in a zigzagging or M-shaped pattern.

It’s generally recommended that scouts observe and take detailed records of environmental conditions, pests, diseases, weeds, crop-growth progress and the overall health of the crop. Reference materials or online resources can help farmers identify pests and crop abnormalities they may not recognize on their own.

“If a grower sees something in the field that they can’t identify, they can always send a photo or sample to an extension agent for help,” says University of Minnesota Extension Entomologist Bob Koch, Ph.D. “I usually recommend that growers carry a hand lens to help them see small pests, a sweep net to aid in the collection of samples and a smartphone or camera to take photos.”

Determining scouting frequency is usually dependent on the time of year, weather and pest populations. If a potential problem does pop up, farmers should check all their fields before assuming the issue is widespread or requires an immediate response.

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.