MAX Yield System – Part 2

MAX Yield System – Part 2

Welcome to the EZ Ag podcast where innovative farming meets practical solutions before we dig into today’s topic, a quick shout out to say thank you to our listeners. Please take a moment to like and subscribe to the EZ Ag podcast so you never miss another episode. Now let’s get to it. 

So getting into part two here on the MAX Yield System today, and we’re going to get into a little bit more detailed information about two of the key parts of the MAX Yield System. I want to back up real quick, and I want to talk just a little bit about what the MAX Yield System is and why we do it. Just a little reminder, in case you missed last week’s or this last podcast episode, the MAX Yield System is really a customizable approach to planning. The thing that I love about the MAX Yield System, you take that customizable approach to planning, you put it into action. What do you get back from it? Well, you have less stress, you have less uncertainty, you have more confidence in growing your farm, because you have a plan, you know where you’re going. It’s plan that can be updated each year and reused, and it’s not something that you have to start over from scratch every year on, you keep updating that plan, you keep adding little bits of improved management systems over time to that plan, and keep improving it as you go. When you do that, you have less stress, because you have less uncertainty about what needs to be done. It’s really clear, and that gives you more confidence to grow the farm when those opportunities come your way. 

So today, we’re going to dial in. We’re going to talk a little bit more in depth about the crop plan and the seed plan. Like I said in the last episode, all four of these pieces are kind of going on at the same time. It’s hard to talk about all four of them at same time. So we’re going to dial in on these two today, and then in the next episode, we’ll dial into one or two of the others, fertility plan and crop protection plan. Those are pretty big detail pieces there, so we might have to break it out into two separate ones. 

Let’s dive into the crop plan. This is really where you dial this plan in on a field by field basis. The reason that I want to dial the plan in on a field by field basis is there’s things about fields historically that change our current productivity of them. So when we dial it in on a field by field basis, we’re going to review your actual production histories, your APHs on the crops that you’re going to grow on that farm. Are you growing wheat and corn? Are you growing wheat, corn and milo? What’s your rotation there, and what’s your APHs of those crops? The reason we dial into that is because we need to be able to go in and say, okay, on a historic level, we’ve planted 15,000 population on our dry land corn, and we’re achieving 85 bushel per yield on field XYZ, and then go into another field on the farm. Maybe, this is a really productive field, we say, hey, we’ve been planting 16,000 population on this field and we’ve been growing 135 bushel corn on that. From that information, your APH, your long term yield averages, and then what you’ve been doing on a population side, we can set that bushels per 1000 plants goal on a field by field basis. It’s important to do this work field by field and not blanket across the farm because just like I said, there’s things in history about a farm that makes one field more particular or more productive than another, and so let’s do that work on a field by field basis. Let’s make sure that we know where we’re headed on each one of those fields, and set that goal of bushel per 1000 plants, field by field so that we can achieve the highest yields. The reason that setting that goal on field by field basis helps us achieve the highest yield is because we can turn around and we can select hybrids that fit that goal, that bushels per 1000 goal. Obviously, we have some hybrids that flex more than others. We have some hybrids that are more defensive than others, and when we use that information in our hybrid selection, then we end up placing the right hybrid on each field. Rolling right from the crop plan into the seed plan. Now we’re talking, we take that information, crop rotation, bushels per 1000 plants, goal and APHs out of that crop plan. We’re going to turn that into a seed plan, a hybrid by field plan. Anytime we’re doing a hybrid by field plan, we’ve got to think about something else in the back of our heads, and that is, what is our hybrid portfolio, or what does that hybrid portfolio look like? So you watch any of the financial indexes, the price of the Dow Jones is not determined by the value of one single stock. I think there’s 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. That’s why they call it an average. That’s a portfolio of 30 stocks. And while we’re not going to use 30 hybrids across the farm, we do want to make sure that we use a portfolio. The reason we use those portfolios, just like the reason those guys, in mutual funds and in the index funds, use portfolios, is because we’re going to mitigate the risk. You know, what is the risk out there? Well, the risk out there for us is always Mother Nature. We have no idea or no way to control how hot it’s going to be, how dry it’s going to be, how much rain we’re going to receive. We can’t control that, so we have to use that portfolio to mitigate that risk. Inside that portfolio, we’re going to use hybrids that have different strengths. We might use one hybrid that has really excellent drought and heat tolerance, but maybe its top end yield and its ear flex isn’t quite as good as another. We’re going to use another hybrid that has better ear flex. We might use a hybrid that has better pH or faster dry down, depending on the situation and what we want to get out of that field. And we use the portfolio across the farm, along with different planting dates, to mitigate risk at the highest level. So when you have a group of hybrids, you got a hybrid portfolio, you plant that portfolio over the planting window, you mitigate the risk as much as you possibly can out there. There’s always risk. We can’t overcome all of it, but we can do certain things to help overcome that. So let’s dial in that hybrid by field plan using a portfolio that fits the goals of the farm, and those hybrid by field recommendations are going to be based on the information that we pull out of the crop plan, the crop rotation, bushels per 1000, APHs, and that overall risk mitigation that we’re looking for, are we going to mitigate more risk or less and how do we put that into place? 

So that’s all I’ve really got for today, like I said, we’re going to be dialing in information on the fertility plan and the crop protection plan over the next episode or two. We’ll see how long things go. Those can get pretty in depth, but we want to dial in those next two pieces of that MAX Yield System plan, and help you guys this winter, while you’ve got time to put those pieces into place so that next summer is less stressful, you have less uncertainty, and you have more confidence in the crop you’re growing and how you’re going to grow your farm. 

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, thank you!