Corn Growing Degree Days and Soil Temperatures

In digging up some corn seedlings that had been in the ground for a week I was worried about development due to the cool conditions during part of that timeframe. But there was pretty good growth on the young seedling.

So, I compared soil temperatures and Growing Degree Days (GDD) to previous years.

Here’s 2 inch soil Temperatures in Donalsonville from March 3 to March 9 for the last 4 years.

2015 – 60.2 Degrees

2014 – 56.5 Degrees

2013 – 55.8 Degrees

2012 – 61.2 Degrees

So soils have been warmer than the last couple of years for this time frame.

Now lets look at GDD’s. If you go to UGA’s georgiaweather.net you can pull data easily like this to show GDD’s.

We use a base temperature of 50 degrees F and a top temperature of 86 to figure the amount of heat we’ve had on corn that influences growth and development.

Generally it takes about 100 GDD for corn to emerge, so this fits pretty close to what we are seeing.

 You can see in this chart that for March 3 to 9 in 2015, we’ve had more heat than both of the last 2 years, but we are very like 2012.