The U2U Decision Support Tool for Corn Growing Degree Days

This newly-operational corn growing degree-day tool puts current conditions into a 30-year historical perspective and offers trend projections (based on climatology) through the end of the calendar year. Corn, or sometimes called modified, growing degree-days (CGDD) use a temperature base of 50F and a ceiling of 86F. This new CGDD tool can help agriculture producers make a variety of decisions. For example, the CGDD tool can help identify the risks of early and late frosts/freezes at a particular location. The CGDD tool can help in the consideration of corn hybrids based on estimated physiological maturity requirements, along with CGDD projections when making seed purchasing and other growing season decisions. The CGDD tool may be used for marketing, such as looking at historical and projected CGDD when considering forward pricing and crop insurance purchases. The decision support tool for corn producers covers the major corn-producing states in the central US. This tool was developed as part of USDA-supported U2U Useful to Usable Project for transforming climate variability and change information for cereal crop producers.