Tracking Growing Degree Days (GDD’s) is an effective way to monitor the progress of a corn crop and in recent years a number of online tools for tracking GDD’s have been developed. For the Northeast, the Climate Smart Farming GDD tool from Cornell is a great option. Dr. Kitty O’Neil with the North Country Regional Ag Team prepared an instructional video for using the tool. While this tool was designed to estimate GDD accumulation from planting, you can simply enter in silking/tasseling date in the planting date box to track accumulation from that date.

One approach to predicting corn maturity with GDD’s is to monitor GDD’s from planting to harvest and some seed brands provide estimates of GDD’s needed for different hybrids. For corn, the 86/50 method is used for calculating GDD’s, this references a base temperature of 50oF and a maximum of 86oF.