Allan: Here in the east where we get 36" plus annual rainfall, and I suspect you'd call this excessive moisture, we have two unique problems, yet both are nitrogen and both are drainage. I suspect MI is not a lot different from SW ON.
First is a wet year when it continues to stay wet all growing season and the moisture can tie up N, make it not available to the plants. This will usually be spotty as many of these fields don't have uniform drainage.
The second situation is wet at planting time then turns dry as season progresses. Because the water table is high at planting and shorthly thereafter, corn establishes very shallow root system. It comes in dry about end of June, water table drops, and at that time corn has it's root set, and I'll be darned if we can get it going again to follow the moisture down.
Our answer is tile under drainage, sufficient to keep that perminant water table down 36", thus we get much healthier root systems. This spring and summer have been excessively wet, not uncommon to see 6" to 12" high corn having parts of a field completely submerged in water for several days. A systematically tile drained field will get rid of that excess moisture much faster. Lighter soils will drain faster as well. Of course the down side to fast drainage is N leaches away much faster as well.
I went by a field other day heavy clay, corn was all stunted in the low areas of field. One could tell parts of this field had be submerged, maybe more than once. You could also see ruts 12" deep, from side dressing in these wet spots.
And you think of lack of moisture being the problem to deal with. We don't have the kind of problems IA suffered a few weeks back, however we also don't have a Mississippi flowing through the area. Rivers around these lakes are quite short, thus we don't have to deal with up stream neighbors water very often. What falls on the area is what we get.
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