By Tracy Turner
A wheat expert from the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences at The Ohio State University has created a series of YouTube videos that demonstrate how growers can identify the various growth stages of wheat crops.
The series is designed as an online tool to help wheat growers identify various stages of wheat growth and to know what management strategies can be used during each growth stage, said Pierce Paul, an Ohio State University Extension wheat researcher.
The videos, which begin with wheat at Feekes Growth Stage 6, will show all the growth stages of wheat throughout the growing season, said Paul, who is also a plant pathologist with the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.
OSU Extension and OARDC are the outreach and research arms, respectively, of the college.
“These videos are important because growers need to understand what growth stage their crops are in to know when to decide to make nitrogen and herbicide applications and when, later in the season, whether to apply fungicide,” he said. “The benefit of these videos is that they provide a hands-on, so to speak, explanation of how to identify the wheat growth stages.”
The first video, Feekes Growth Stage 6, can be viewed at youtu.be/iukwznx4DPk.
Feekes Growth Stages 7 and 8 can be viewed at youtu.be/PZ7Lvsux1y8, and Identifying Feekes Growth Stages 9 and 10 can be viewed at youtu.be/OHGhq0qSM1o.
As the season progresses, Paul will post three more videos depicting the next and final wheat growth stages.