It’s cliché, I get it, every seed company out there has some way of saying they are selecting the right hybrid for the right field or acre on your farm, and in some way, it is true. But as different as each company is, so are the recommendations that get made, and likely the most important factors that the seed salesperson looks at to make those recommendations.
So for today’s post, I’m going to start off by making a bold claim: I take hybrid selection and placement seriously. So seriously, that I rarely make a hybrid decision without considering information about the field and management goals for the operation.
Because of this, I want to give you a preview into what it looks like to work with Axis Seed – Red Barn on selecting the right hybrid for each field on your farm. A few “rules of the row” as we like to call them are:
- Use Product Portfolios to Reduce Risk
- Understand Management
- Evaluate Field Obstacles
- Evaluate “Bushels per 1,000” Performance and Yield Goals
Let’s take a closer look at each one:
Use Product Portfolios to Reduce Risk
Product portfolios are simply a risk mitigation strategy. It is similar to the concept of a mutual fund in the financial investments industry, or like your mother may have told you, “Don’t put your eggs all in one basket.” When you want to continue to make advances in finance but don’t desire to have significant risk, you take a less risky approach of purchasing stock in a mutual fund rather than a single company’s stock.
In this example, planting only one hybrid on all the acres of your farm would be like buying stock in one company, and planting a portfolio of three to five different hybrids would be similar to buying stock in a mutual fund. The differences in relative maturity, drought tolerance, ear flex, disease tolerance, and a number of other factors reduce the risk of any one of Mother Nature’s uncontrollable variables wreaking havoc on your farm.
It’s important to note, at Axis Seed – Red Barn the diversity of a product portfolio is determined by the size of the operation and the variability in soils and management practices NOT by our company’s sales goals. We firmly believe in making the right decisions for your unique operation and goals, and we stand steadfast in this conviction.
Understand Management
Understanding the unique management systems that are used and the goals for the field and the farm are both important variables in selecting the right hybrids to include in your product portfolio. Key pieces of information needed here are, soil pH, fertility plans, previous and future crop plans for the field, and, if applicable, irrigation management.
We’ll dive deeper into soil pH and fertility plans when we discuss field obstacles, so let’s start with previous and future crop plans:
It is important that we understand your field’s past as well as your future plans for it. Not only could this impact a decision like relative maturity (RM), but it could also impact the trait package that is optimal for that field.
For example, if your corn is being planted after milo but prior to wheat we are going to select a hybrid with a shorter RM (relative maturity) to accommodate the continuous crop rotation, while also pairing that RM with a defensive hybrid that offers tolerance to both drought and heat stress.
Remember, we can’t control Mother Nature so we control variables like RM and trait package to accommodate for the “what if’s” of the growing season.
And now, a pivot – pun intended – to irrigation management:
When we look at selecting hybrid portfolios in a dryland management system we are always looking for hybrids that have defensive characteristics along with flex in order to take advantage of the rain when we get it and defend against heat and drought.
When we move into limited irrigation and fully irrigated environments we also need to shift our approach to hybrid selection because irrigated environments ultimately decrease yield efficiency. Pushing population densities can help offset these decreases and increase your overall yield, but we need to understand how, when, and at what rate you plan to feed that field water to better pick hybrids suited for the management and goals of the field.
Evaluate Field Obstacles
If farming in Western Kansas for the last few decades has taught me anything, it’s the ever-present impact pH and soil fertility have on yield outcomes. pH continually rears its head as a limiting factor for yield, especially in high pH environments, while soil fertility remains one of the most important soil characteristics for crop growth.
For farmers who want to dive deep into what these two field obstacles can mean for their operational success, I recommend coming to a meeting armed with soil sampling data and your fertility plan.
If you don’t have those, no sweat! Our team pairs decades of experience in combination with tools like the Google Earth Web Soil Survey to understand your field’s soil characteristics and develop your own customized fertility plan to help you achieve your goals.
Evaluate “Bushels per 1,000” Performance & Yield Goals
“Bushels per 1000” is a measurement of yield efficiency and helps us determine the proper planting population by evaluating the management system in which we are making a recommendation.
There are a couple of different ways to look at this:
The first is to look at a field’s Actual Production History, also known as APH. Taking the APH and dividing it by the planted population gives you a good idea of how the previous hybrids and management have been performing. For example, a field that has an APH of 112 with a historical population of 16,000 would be performing at the level of 7 Bu/1,000.
A second way to look at Bu/1,000 is by using your yield goal. Starting with a yield goal of 120 Bu we would divide this by your estimated planting population, 15K in this example, and we would know that your Bu/1,000 goal is 8.
To take this a step further, in dryland production yields can vary greatly in Bu/1,000 because the uncontrollable variables created by Mother Nature can create both success and disaster on a year-to-year basis. As a long term goal though, if we are hitting the range of 7-13 Bu/1,000 we are doing a good job of selecting a product portfolio for the farm or field we are working on.
In irrigated and limited irrigated fields we typically see yield efficiency decline because higher plant densities do not allow for flex hybrids to take full advantage of their genetic potential. For limited irrigation, I would expect to see populations maxing out in the 7-11 Bu/1,000 plants. In situations where we are under full irrigation with populations greater than 28K, we typically see those populations max out around that 8-9 Bu/1,000 range.
We won’t get into it yet, but in an upcoming blog post we’ll review “Bushels per 1,000” further and how this measurement of yield efficiency can help farmers assess additional in-season investment opportunities to push yield like fungicide applications.
To close out this week’s post, I’ll finish with this:
Each field you farm has its own proprietary data package that helps our team better tailor hybrid recommendations to your fields. The combination of product portfolios, management tactics, common field obstacles, and “Bushels per 1,000” are the data building blocks to pairing our high quality Axis Seed hybrids with the optimal field in your operation to maximize performance.
Helping you transform your farm’s future requires diligence to every detail and we assure you, there isn’t a seed company out there who takes this responsibility as seriously as we do.
Contact us and start your 2024 hybrid-by-field plan today!
This post was written by Axis Seed – Red Barn Enterprises President and resident corn expert, Matt Long.
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