Someone called this the harvest from hell -- that might not be too much of an exaggeration.

As we said this morning, the new kid on the block is vomitoxin (and probably some other mycotoxins), apparently an issue in some pockets in different parts of the Corn Belt -- mostly ECB, but we've seen reports of incidents in northeast Nebraska and even Pennsylvania.

"The worst problems we heard about were mostly in corn that was planted early, which for this year means planted in April," said Emerson Nafziger, ag economist at the University of Illinois. "And of these, the problem wasn't uniformly distributed. Much of this was Diplodia and it had to have the right conditions to infect during pollination, it's not in all fields planted at the same time.

"I'm sure there were/are problems in some later-planted corn, but I know we didn't see much of the grain quality problem in what we harvested in the Champaign area," Nafziger told me in an email. "We also didn't see much in any of our 12 hybrid trials around Illinois. None of these was planted in April, as I recall."

Apparently detecting the toxin can be tricky. "Some grain that could have a fair amount of toxin might not show really bad symptoms. And, a lot of symptoms showing up doesn't necessarily mean high levels of toxins. It's one of those things where you need to test to make sure," Nafziger said.

Those issues have to be a concern for producers putting corn into on-farm storage.

For those taking corn to town, it's still an open question about how elevators are going to handle damaged grain. Discount schedules can change without notice, Purdue ag economist Chris Hurt reminded me. He's seen differences in discounts from 3 cents per point up to 5.5 cents, and discounts for damage ran from a dime to 30 cents.

For ethanol plants, vom could be an even dicier issue, since processing corn into DDGs concentrates the toxicity -- a problem for livestock feeders, especially swine.

And on the feeding side, livestock producers who turn cattle into corn stalks need to exercise some caution, according to extension agents at Colorado State University. "The wet, cool summer delayed corn from maturing as readily as it would in a normal year. Additionally, the early freeze caught a lot of corn before it was ready and caused the development process to stop. As a result, a lot of corn fields have maintained a high moisture content (many above 20 percent). This has led to the development of molds and fungi in a lot of fields," according to a CSU website posting. "The plant pathology diagnostic lab at Colorado State University has identified several molds and fungi on recent field corn samples. Trichoderma, Nigrospora, and Fusarium have all been identified thus far and the diagnostic lab is continuing to culture samples in search of other potential problems. Livestock producers need to be aware that these fungi may be present in the 2009 corn crop; both grain in the bin and ears of corn on the ground among stalks.

Mike Hutjens at the University of Illinois recently posted some advice on dealing with toxins in feed, at http://www.aces.uiuc.edu/…

DTN subscribers can read more on this topic, in "Late Corn Harvest Worries" in DTN AgNews.