
From The Combine Seat
Welcome to the EZ Ag podcast where innovative farming meets practical solutions. Today, what I want to visit with you guys real quick about, is, what to look for when you’re in the seat of the combine, or in my case, what maybe I look for when I come out, ride your combine for a couple rounds in a field. And there’s things we can always learn from that combine seat that we can’t learn from any other vantage point on the farm and so just want to give you a little glimpse real quick of some of the things that I look at, and the first question that I always try to answer for myself is, do I see variability, or do I see consistency? The reason I look at that first is because I know that the most consistent crops are typically the highest yielding crops, and their genetics, the management and the environment, those three pieces all came together in a fashion to where we had the ability to achieve the highest yield possible in that field. So look at the variability if you have it, or look at the consistency if you have it. Understand if you have consistency, the only way you can really get a higher yield is by changing some management factor out there. So whether that’s fertility, planting population, you gotta make some change in a management factor in order to increase the yield on a field where you have consistency.
The next thing, this is the fun thing everybody likes to look at; that’s the yield monitor. While it’s fun to look at the yield monitor, it’s kind of the wrong thing to put too much focus on in the combine because yield is a very two-dimensional look at the result of the year. When I say the result of the year, that’s really the result of that combination of genetics, management and environment, which is a very multi-dimensional, three or four-dimensional object that you just get one flat layer out of. So it’s fun to look at yield, but it’s really not the best measure of the performance of that field. After that, something I’m looking at is plant health. I want to see a corn crop that’s very consistent, very intact, depending on the timing of the year; maybe has a high level of stay green. So what I mean by intactness is, is that plant all intact from root up to the tassel. If the tops have blown out of bunch of corn and the corn is still fairly wet in grain moisture, then it’s like, well, that corn doesn’t have very good intactness. Or if we’re combining a field that is standing well, but a bunch of those tops are coming in through the combine, piling up on the feeder house, we don’t have very good intactness there. That’s something that doesn’t typically make a grower very happy when they’re in the field. Stay green, what I’m talking about there is, how much green plant material do we still have out in that field. And the reason the stay green is really important is because the longer we can keep a plant green, typically, the better chance we have for achieving higher yield. If the plant is a dye and dry, it’s made all the yield that it can make, at that point that it dies, and then that grain starts to dry down. One that stays green and healthy, and that grain dries down slower and stays, maybe the husk is the first thing that turns brown on that crop, we know we’ve got a good, healthy plant there.
Next thing I’m going to look at is planter performance. So I want to see consistent ear height. I want to see consistent ear size, and I want to see consistent plant spacing out there in the field. And this is really something you could be taking notes on any of these things as you’re going through the field, but planter performance is something that you can really dial in some notes on and help yourself gain that higher yield. Next year, you could plant the same hybrid, have a better planter performance and gain a higher yield if you had done a better job in that field.
Then the last thing I’m going to take notes on is just general hybrid performance. We got hybrid XYZ in this field, we want to think through a couple things. One, what is the bushels per 1000 plants that we’re achieving in this field, because really bushels per 1000, that’s the measurement of the hybrid’s performance. Yield, that two dimensional yield that we were looking at earlier, that’s the performance of the field or the performance of the management system, not necessarily the performance of a hybrid. In our dry land environment, and most of our limited irrigation environments, we’re really pushing for a 10 bushels per 1000 plants. Sometimes in fully irrigated, we’re looking at that 8 to 10. But how can we get that bushels per 1000 plants performance up there? And a lot of that has to do, especially in the dry land with the weather which, quote, unquote, makes up about 48% of the yield in any given year. But is there things that we can do better, like hybrid selection that help us with that hybrid performance? The next thing I want to look at is, do we see variability in the hybrids performance based on soil type? We’re screening pretty intensively now for hybrids that can withstand differences in high soil pH’s. Do you see a difference in that hybrid’s performance based on soil type? And if you do, make a note of that so that we can improve our product placement on your farm next year.
Then the last thing I always want to look at is, what do we see in hybrid performance versus management? The reason I bring it back to management; there are some of our farms we’ve been farming for different amounts of time. Is this field a really long term, no-till field that we’ve used a lot of composted manure and has really high soil fertility versus another field where maybe the same hybrid didn’t perform as well that has only been in our farm for a couple years or has a lot of tillage history in it, things like that. We have to look at that hybrid’s performance, but we have to look at it, by the management strategy in that field, too. There’s a lot of things that we can take notes on right now. There’s no other time that we can gather this much information about product performance and use that information to make better decisions on where we place product next year and how we manage product next year. Don’t zone in on that yield number and think yield is the only measurement out there that matters, because there’s a lot more to it than yield. That’s all for today. I’m Matt Long, thanks for joining us on this episode of EZ Ag. Grow your yield. Grow your Legacy. Grow Strong with Axis Seed.
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