This past week has brought some drier weather to east central Illinois than the week prior. In the eastern half of McLean County, soil moisture conditions looked good, overall, during my survey. Most fields have started to dry in the top couple of inches of the soil profile, but some parts of low-lying and/or poorly drained fields still had soils that were at field capacity. Compared to some of my surveys in recent weeks in neighboring counties, I saw very few soybean fields showing spots of plant stress due to waterlogging and/or soil-borne pathogens. A few of the corn fields I visited were showing early signs of stalk rot in some plants, although this seemed to be largely limited, at this time, to those wetter fields I mentioned earlier. Something else I saw in several of these wetter corn fields was corn ears containing both brown, senesced silks and unpollinated silks. The tassels in these fields did not appear to be shedding any viable pollen, which may mean it’s too late for these silks/ovules to make grain. Most corn was in the late R3 (milk) to early R4 (dough) range, but I did find one field at early dent (R5) and another still at blister (R2). Soybeans ranged from R3 (beginning pod) to late R5 (beginning seed), with most falling in the latter half of that range.