MAX Yield System – Part 1

MAX Yield System – Part 1

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I wanted to start out today talking about a little series here for the next few episodes of the podcast about the MAX Yield System. We’ve talked about a couple components of the MAX Yield System already. A few weeks ago, we talked about soil sampling and how you use consistency to create better data in your soil sampling. Those soil samples are going to become part of the fertility plan in the MAX Yield System. Then we also talked about test plot data a couple weeks ago, and if we think about that test plot data, that’s going to help us in the MAX Yield System when we get to the seed plan, because we’re trying to build those hybrid portfolios, and we’re going to try to do that over multi year data coming out of those test plots. 

I just want to back up real quick, though, and talk a little bit about the MAX Yield System. Go through each of the four key parts, talk about the pieces that are in those and why I love using the MAX Yield System for planning and different pieces that you can gather from it. Then over the next couple episodes, we’re going to break that down. We’re going to break down some of the pieces, some of those four key parts, into more detail as we go. 

Probably the number one thing, or one of the top reasons that I like using the MAX Yield System with growers is because it’s a customizable approach to planning. Many things that we go through in life when you’re trying to create a plan, it’s you got to do this, and then you got to do this, and you got to do this, and you got to do this. One of the things that I know from the last decade or so in this business is I’ve got a lot of customers and a lot of successful customers, and not two of those customers get to that successful point the exact same way. Everybody’s got a little different challenge. They got different opportunities, different ways of handling those obstacles that are on their farm, whether that’s from an equipment standpoint, from a knowledge standpoint, from a risk standpoint, they just do things a little bit differently. But they’re all getting to that point where success is part of it. The MAX Yield System is a customizable approach. We have kind of some general guidelines of things we’re going to work within, but some of the specific details within those guidelines are different on a farm by farm basis, when we get that whole plan done. 

The reason I think sometimes I get to talking about planning, and I get to talking about the MAX Yield System, and I have growers that almost just roll their eyes, like, why would you create a plan? Well, growers who create a plan, they make better decisions. 100% of the decisions that you make are not going to be made within the plan, but if we make a plan that we think covers 100% of decisions, we’re more likely going to use 80-90% of those decisions that we planned when we get to the field. If we’ve pre-made 80 or 90% of our decisions by creating a plan, we have very few decisions that we have to make on the fly, and we have very few decisions that we make in error, because we make better decisions when we have more time to make them. You make these plans far in advance to give you that time, and at the end of the day, those growers who really create a plan, I think they’re happier. They have less stress. They have more confidence in their ability to grow their farm when the opportunity arises, because they have a plan that they say, “Oh, look, I’ve got this opportunity to grow. All I have to do is copy and paste that plan onto this new piece of ground that I have the opportunity to rent or buy, and I already have knowledge of how that plan works for me over time.” Taking over new grounds almost always has some pitfalls to it, but when you have a plan going into that, you know where you’re going to work out those kinks and how you’re going to get through that. That’s why I like creating a plan. The MAX Yield System is very customizable. 

I am going to quickly go into the four key parts of the MAX Yield System. We’ve got the crop plan, we’ve got the seed plan, we’ve got the fertility plan, and we have the crop protection plan. Really, you’re going to develop these four plans almost simultaneously or you could kind of go through them one at a time and develop each one. When you go to the field, all four of these plans are used simultaneously,so you kind of can start building them out simultaneously too. Let’s just talk real quick about some of the pieces of each one of those plans, and then we’ll let you guys go. We’ll do a deep dive into these over the next couple episodes. 

The first key part of the MAX Yield System is the crop plan. Really, when you’re looking at the crop plan, you’re looking at simple things like crop rotation. On a field by field basis, this field’s in wheat, it’s going to corn, or this fields in corn, it’s going to Milo, or this field’s going to fallow, or things like that. You’re just looking at what crop rotation you have on a field by field basis. and then based on those crop rotations, and based on a review of your A PHS, a review of your historical yields, you’re going to set a goal, especially in corn. We want to set a goal in how many bushels per 1000 plants that we’re putting out there. We’re always recommending populations 13 to 17,000 on our dry land, say 20 to 28,000 on limited or fully irrigated corn. We want to really tie those populations back into this piece here, which is a bushel per 1000 plants goal. Okay, so that’s really what the crop plan is, it’s pretty basic for the crop plan. 

Then we turn the page and we start working in the seed plan. Once we have identified what crop is going to go on each field, we’re going to identify what hybrid we’re going to put on each field, and we’re going to do that by using hybrid portfolios. The reason we use hybrid portfolios is to mitigate risk. But in the seed plan here, this is where we’re going to review data. We’re going to review yield history and bushel per 1000 history of hybrids that we’ve had on our farm, of hybrids that we’re looking at in test plots, and we’re going to develop that hybrid portfolio to mitigate that risk. 

When we’re done with the seed plan, we’re going to turn the page to the fertility plan. This is why I say these things kind of go on simultaneously, because you could start the fertility plan before you even started the crop plan, as long as you know that you need to go out and do that soil sampling. Soil sampling is the first piece of the fertility plan. From those soil samples, we’re going to analyze the results. We’re going to make decisions based on our bushels per 1000 goal that we made up there in the crop plan, we’re going to make decisions based on our seed plan, what hybrid we’re placing on that field and we’re going to use that information from the crop plan, the seed plan, along with the soil sample, to create that fertility plan. Then kind of building out this other side of our business, biologicals, foliars, micronutrients, we’re going to start looking at that fertility plan and saying what other pieces make sense in there? We’ll talk about this a lot more in depth when we get to the part where we go into the fertility plan but over fertilizing, in my opinion, can burn up a crop faster than having the right rate out there. How do you know what the right rate is? Well, that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, dialing those things in on that fertility plan, and we gotta ground that in our soil sampling. 

The last piece, here we’ve got this crop protection plan. We’re going to evaluate the weed issues that we may have on a field by field basis, so that when we’re kind of doing that, blanket apply on the farm with this product or that product we have in the back of our head, “okay, this field, this field, and this field, they have a weed issue that we don’t see on other parts of the farm.” We need to overcome that weed issue in our crop protection plan. A big piece of the crop protection plan is herbicide, but fungicides, insecticides are part of that crop protection plan. The whole crop protection plan is based on that bushels per 1000 plants goal, we can’t just be out there using fungicides and insecticides when we don’t need to, to achieve our goal out there. We also want to create the highest ROI along the way too. We understand that you create more ROI by growing more bushel, a lot faster than you do by cutting expenses, but we want to make sure that it still makes sense what we’re putting into these plans. 

So like I said earlier, I like using this approach because it’s customizable. We go through it with growers on a field by field basis. We create these plans. And one of the things that I love about MAX Yield System planning is that the plans never die. They don’t just end at the end of the season. You can reuse a lot of that information from your MAX Yield System plan in your next year’s plan. When you turn the page on that crop rotation to the next crop on that field, you can just update those a little bit each year based on new hybrids, based on new crop protection and new fertility plans, and kind of make those little updates each year and keep using it and keep reusing it. Probably the first year of going through MAX Yield System planning, maybe the first and second year of going through that approach is where you really invest a lot of time in it, and after that, you’re just going through updating the little bits of information along the way and moving into the next year. When you do that, like I said, less stress, more confidence and happier. Who doesn’t like doing that? 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.