Western seed companies are currently purchasing large quantities of seed from Ohio's seed producers. Ohio soybean farmers should book their seed needs as soon as possible to make sure they will have seed to plant. The numbers came from fields in Ohio, where we have multiple year data but most came from Dr. Mac Riedels crop rotation study. For the lawyers and bean counters out there, this is the trend that we have seen over and over again, there are many environmental factors, weeds, soil sampling techniques that all influence what the actual SCN numbers are in any given field. We developed this worksheet for Regional Agronomy Meetings and soybean short courses to demonstrate how cyst populations can be managed with crop rotation.
Crop rotation is a VERY effective tool in managing soybean cyst nematodes.
This is how it works. Every time you plant a non-host crop in a field, you are starving the nematodes that hatch and look for something to feed. If there is nothing to feed on, they die, thereby reducing the populations. Soybean Cyst Nematode populations increase 10-fold in newly infested fields with every susceptible soybean crop. This is very dependent on soil type and the environmental conditions that exist in a given field during the production season.