Four teams honed their crop scouting skills while vying for top honors in the fifth annual Crop Scouting Competition for Nebraska Youth Thursday at the Eastern Nebraska Research and Extension Center near Mead. Teams of students who had completed 5-12th grades completed a written knowledge test and seven crop scouting exercises in field plots. 

The contest is to help students learn crop scouting and principles of integrated pest management (IPM) for corn and soybeans in Nebraska, to obtain knowledge and skills that will be helpful in future careers, and to demonstrate newer crop scouting technologies.

Results

Winners were:

First place – Colfax County 4-H (Logan Nelson, Brad Kratochvil, Austin Steffensmeier and Korbin Kudera)

Second place – Kornhusker Kids 4-H Club of Cuming County (Payton and Levi Schiller, Matthew and James Rolf and Kaleb Hasenkamp)

Third place – Humphrey FFA Team No. 2 (Mikayla Martensen, Bryce Classen, Jacob Brandl, and Wyatt Wegener)

Also participating was

Fillmore Central FFA with Carson and Brock Tatro, KayLynn Sieber, Kaylea Geiser and Gunner Gewecke.

The top-scoring teams won prizes of $500 for first, $250 for second, $100 for third place. The top two teams will represent Nebraska at the regional competition held in Nebraska in late August.

Teams were expected to know the basics of scouting corn and soybean fields, including crop staging; patterns of crop injury; and disease, insect and weed seedling identification. 

More information about the crop scouting competition is available online at cropwatch.unl.edu/youth under the link for "Crop Scouting Competition.”

This program was sponsored by DuPont Pioneer, the Nebraska Independent Crop Consultant Association, and Farm Credit Services of America in collaboration with Nebraska Extension. If you or a company you know would be interested in sponsoring the 2019 program, please contact brandy.vandewalle@unl.edu.