MAX Yield System Seed Plan Legacy Building
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So today, I want to jump in here and visit with you guys a little bit more in depth about Axis Seed. You know about how it fits into the seed plan, part of the MAX Yield system. And I’m really gonna visit with you about our hybrid testing program and how this is really a legacy building program, both for our business and for your farm. And so, you know, just to get back to some of the basics. Axis Seed is a national brand. It’s made up of 19 independent regional companies that cover 25 states. And what we do as part of that regional company here at Red Barn, we’re the independent regional company for west central and southwest Kansas. And really we get to make those independent decisions about hybrids and prices and program that fit our geography. So I want to kind of dial back into this Axis Seed is a national brand with local ownership. And what we’re doing here at Red Barn, we’re dialing in the data, we’re using local testing, we’re making local ratings, and we’re getting local results. We’re using data that’s more local, we believe, than any of our competitors. And the reason we’re doing that is because your farm is more valuable and more local, in our opinion, than any set of data from anywhere else. And so, last week here in January, we were in Iowa for the winter production meeting for Axis Seed. We came together with these other 19 regional companies. So the owners, the agronomy teams, the product selection specialists for these other businesses, and we come together with the companies that breed the corn that we select from to test and to produce to sell in this geography. And so one of the really finite things about this is we’re making an independent decision that could be different than the next IRC in the room, and we’re working directly with those breeders to develop the product portfolio that fits our geography. But we also get to hear the feedback from those breeders about what they saw in our geography and across other areas, as well as what the other IRC owner and product specialists saw about those hybrids.
And so I wanted to kind of flip back to that legacy building idea that I first put out there in late January in our Grow Your Legacy email, how do you create a plan and what the MAX Yield system brings to you? And then I’m going to show you guys, or give you guys, a little peek into how I use that same system in our business. And so if you remember, from January in the Grow Your Yield email, I talked about Plan, Execute and Debrief. And then later in the Grow Your Legacy email, I talked about Good, Difficult and Different. And so I’m kind of going to just tell you real quick about how I use these two systems in this hybrid selection. And so, if you look at what we did in 2024 we came up with a plan for local testing of commercial and experimental hybrids. And the reason we really want to get that local testing is because we want to have that local data on these hybrids. And so we put out six plots in 2024, pH, flex, dry land, limited and fully irrigated environments, and we developed a rubric for rating these hybrids. And so that was really how we planned to go to the field and evaluate both commercial and experimental hybrids in our system, and so that’s the plan piece. So how did we execute that piece? Well, we executed that piece by going to the field, going into every one of these plots on a weekly basis throughout the summer. So once that corn starts popping out of the ground, we’re out there making ratings on it. And we did that every week. And when we’re out in those fields, we even flagged where we walked those plots so that we got ourselves back into the same area every week, so that we could really get a good rating from week to week on the changes of those corn hybrids. And then at the end of the day, you kind of need to develop a little bit of focus, because our rubric for rating these hybrids has 19 different characteristics that we’re rating, so we really have to dial that into what are the most important of those characteristics? Obviously, the most important characteristic is yield. That’s the thing that drives profitability and return on investment on your farm, and so yield being one of those top ones. But how do we get to that yield? Well, ear flex is a big mover in our market, pH tolerance and drought tolerance. And so we dialed in on those four top metrics, yield, ear flex, pH tolerance and drought tolerance, but we went ahead and rated these across all 19 of those metrics, so that if there was some other undesirable trait about when these hybrids, we could cull them out of the program. So plan, execute, now we’re at the debrief stage.
So debrief, what did we learn in 2024 and how do we improve the 2025 testing program? You remember, in the debrief, we use Good, Difficult, Different scenarios to figure out, what did we do Good? Well, one of the good things, I think, that came out of this, is we gained more knowledge of the of our products. We gained more knowledge even of our commercial products, which results in higher yields on your farm through better product placement decisions for the 2025 growing season. So what was Difficult about the things that we did in the field? Well, one of the really difficult things that we can’t control, but it is something we need to try to manage a little better, is we weren’t able to overcome the drought conditions in our dry land testing environments. So we didn’t get that yield number back, and we didn’t really get a good look at the ear flex of some of these hybrids in a dry land environment. And so when we’re looking at Difficult, we’re looking at what was something that didn’t go well but needs to be improved for next year. And so in 2025 we got to look at, how do we overcome those drought conditions in the dry land testing environments?
Then the last part of this debrief, what do we do Different so what didn’t work, or what didn’t work really well. And you know, one of the things that we had that was a pretty big struggle was plot layout, and part of this is because of plot size. So we had a lot of hybrids in our testing program last year, and we had a lot of tests out there. So this year, we need to dial in. We need to take a different approach to plot layout and plot size, and then we also need to make sure, as we’re going through, we do a better job of product selection by environment, by relative maturity and by crop rotation. So we had one plot in particular that was continuous corn environment, and we have several hybrids that are above ground only. That trait package didn’t work in that environment, and so we got to take a Different approach next year. We got to make sure that we’re selecting those products by Environment relative maturity and crop rotation. So let’s just talk real quick before we take off, about what we gained from the 2024 testing program. You know, we tested 16 brand new hybrids. We were able to commercialize two of those hybrids from the yield results that will be planted on farms in 2025 so then what does the 2025 testing program look like? Well, we’re excited to expand our testing program from six to 11 plots for evaluation. And so we’re going from six locations this year in those different environments to 11 locations next year. We’re shrinking the size of those plots down a little bit. We’re expanding our testing from two counties to five counties in west central and southwest Kansas. We’re going to retest six hybrids from the 2024 class, because they look like they had some potential, but they also look like they might have some holes in them. So we need to take a little closer look at those before we commercialize them. We’re going to commercialize three additional hybrids. We didn’t have the opportunity to get seed on these for 2025 planting, but we’re going to commercialize three additional hybrids from the 2024 class that we can plant on your farm in 2026 and those hybrids will be in the plots again this year. And then we’re going to test 17 brand new hybrids in 2025. So a couple things about these 17 hybrids is they range in maturity, relative maturity, from 98 day to 117 day. So you know, we’re kind of getting the full gamut there, on planting timing and genetic potential. They include genetic options from the four main providers that we’re working with, Corteva, Bayer, Syngenta, and Thurston is a BASF company, and then it includes three different above ground trait stacks and two above and below ground trait stacks. So we’re looking at five different trait stacks on these 17 new hybrids from these four different providers, and we’re going to run them back through that same rigorous testing scenario that we had where we plant now at 11 local plots, we evaluate those plots on a weekly basis against 19 hybrid characteristics, and we’re looking really in depth at those four, yield, ear flex, pH tolerance, and drought tolerance but we’re using other pieces of those 15 to cull out some of the hybrids that don’t fit our geography. And what that means to us is, just like I said at the beginning we have more local data than our competitors because your farm is more valuable and more local than any set of data from anywhere else.
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!
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