Maximize the Opportunity
Max Yield doesn’t mean max input.
Welcome back to the EZ Ag Podcast, where innovative farming meets practical solutions. I’m your host, Matt Long, and today we’re going to dive back into the Max Yield System and follow up on a lot of information we shared with everyone who was in attendance at this year’s Axis Seed – Red Barn Field Day.
But first, just a quick note to all of you who were able to make it: thank you for attending and for a great evening of conversations.
Now, let’s dig in with the next big question of the night.
Does the Max Yield System work?
That’s a pretty easy question to answer when we’ve got a good crop growing, when there’s moisture, when conditions are favorable, and when there’s a lot of yield potential sitting in front of us. It’s easy to talk about doing more to maximize that crop.
But there’s a much better question that I think we need to explore.
Does the Max Yield System work when it doesn’t rain?
Because that’s the reality of farming in western Kansas. There are years when Mother Nature gives us a tremendous opportunity, there are years when she gives us very little, and there are a lot of years where we end up somewhere in between.
So if the Max Yield System only works when everything goes right, then it really isn’t much of a system at all.
And that gets to the main point I want to talk about today, and that’s that the Max Yield System doesn’t mean maximum input. It means building a system that gives us the best chance to maximize whatever opportunity actually exists.
If we’re going to build a system around maximizing opportunity, the first place we have to start is with the foundation of the crop itself. And for us, that starts with the seed.
One of the phrases we use at Axis Seed is “national brand, local ownership.” And I think these two things are really powerful when you put them together.
Being part of Axis gives us access to genetics, traits, and quality standards from four major genetic providers in over 20 trait platforms. But access itself isn’t really the goal.
The goal isn’t simply to have more choices. The goal is to have the right choices for western Kansas.
That’s where the local side matters. We’re testing these products here. This year, we’ve got nine local research plots and 29 pre-commercial hybrids ranging from 98 to 117 days in relative maturity.
And we’re not just putting them all in one environment and calling it good. We’re evaluating them in dryland environments, our flex trial, irrigated environments, high-pH situations, and for silage.
We’re also farming here. We’re dealing with the same soils, the same weather, the same irrigation limitations, and the same economics that people here are dealing with. And that’s how we’re making the recommendations that we are.
So when we recommend a hybrid, I don’t want that recommendation to just be based on a plot book from somewhere else. I want us to understand why that hybrid fits that field.
But choosing the right hybrid is only one decision in a much bigger system.
Once we know what we’re planting, the next question becomes: How do we manage everything around that seed to give it the best chance to succeed?
That’s really where the Max Yield System starts.
And maybe one of the biggest misconceptions about Max Yield is that it means a bigger input package: more fertilizer, more biologicals, more fungicide, more passes, more money.
That’s not what we’re trying to build.
The Max Yield System starts long before planting, with a seed plan, a fertility and biological plan, and a crop protection plan.
There’s a lot of value in doing that planning early. It reduces some of the stress of trying to make every decision in the heat of the season. It gives us more confidence in the production system. But most importantly, it gives us a baseline.
The purpose of the plan isn’t to lock us in. The purpose of the plan is to give us something intelligent to adjust from.
And one of the first places we apply that thinking is in how we build a hybrid portfolio. We talk about different relative maturities, different backgrounds, matching hybrids to fields, and thinking about the planting windows.
That’s really a form of risk management.
There are some risks in farming that we simply can’t eliminate. We can’t control the weather, and we can’t control the markets. But we can control whether we expose every acre to the same risk at the same time.
If all of our corn flowers in the same five-day window and we get a stretch of 105-degree temperatures right through pollination, we’ve concentrated our risk.
A good hybrid portfolio helps spread some of that risk out.
But even the best hybrid portfolio on paper doesn’t mean much if we don’t get those hybrids established correctly in the field. And that’s what takes us to planting.
I asked everybody at the Field Day a question that I think almost every farmer can relate to:
Have you ever experienced FOMO during planting season? The fear of missing out?
You see the neighbor planting. You see planters running down the highway. The calendar starts getting later. You look at the weather forecast, and pretty soon there’s this pressure that says we’ve got to go.
But some of the biggest opportunities we have to influence yield happen right there at the planter.
Our high-yield planting priorities are pretty simple.
First is soil conditions at planting time. Second is our seed placement. Third is our seed quality. And fourth is placing the right hybrid in the right field.
We’re not just trying to get the crop planted. We’re trying to establish the best crop we reasonably can.
If it rains, we’ve positioned ourselves to take advantage of that opportunity. And if it doesn’t, hopefully we’ve still built a stronger root system, a better stand, and maybe it’s just better residue going into the next crop.
Once the crop is established, though, the plan has to become even more flexible because now Mother Nature starts telling us what kind of opportunity we actually have.
That’s where I like to simplify post-planting management down to three words:
Push, protect, or pull.
If conditions are good and yield potential is increasing, maybe it’s time to push.
That was more representative of some of what we saw in 2025. We had good crops with good potential. So the question became: What can we do to take a good crop and make it great?
But that’s not every year.
Sometimes we’ve got a decent crop and something threatens to take the potential away. Then our job is to protect.
This year, on some of our irrigated acres, spider mites were a good example. At that point, we’re not necessarily trying to create another 20 or 30 bushels. We’re trying to protect the bushels we’ve already built.
And then there’s the third category: pull, or pull back.
That’s been a much more common conversation on dryland this year. When Mother Nature starts pulling yield potential away, we’ve got to be willing to change the plan.
Just because we planned an input in January doesn’t mean it still makes sense in July.
And that’s where the whole idea comes back around.
Max Yield does not mean max input.
If the opportunity gets bigger, we can push. If something threatens it, we can protect. And if the opportunity disappears, we need to be disciplined enough to pull back.
Eventually, every one of those decisions gets graded.
Harvest tells us what the system got right, what it got wrong, and what we need to learn from it.
And I like to evaluate that in three categories: good, difficult, and different.
What was good? What worked that we want to keep doing next year?
What was difficult? Maybe it was the right idea, but the execution needs to improve. Maybe it needs to stay in the plan, but we need to find a way to make it easier or more consistent.
And then, what do we need to do differently? What did we try that simply didn’t work and we don’t want to repeat?
Harvest shouldn’t close the book on the year. It should help us refine next year’s plan.
And one of the areas where that evaluation process has already changed our thinking over the last year is soil fertility.
Last fall, we started doing more extensive soil sampling through our Get the Dirt on Your Soil program.
We’re doing a complete analysis on the 0-to-6-inch sample, and then we’re also pulling that 6-to-24-inch sample for nitrate.
Once we started putting together several hundred of those samples, we really saw some interesting patterns start showing up.
For example, our average nitrate result in the top six inches represented about 22 pounds per acre. But when we looked at the 6-to-24-inch sample, there was also another 45 pounds per acre on average.
That’s roughly 67 pounds of nitrogen per acre already sitting in the soil profile before we start talking about any additional credits.
Now, that doesn’t mean every field had 67 pounds sitting there. And that’s exactly why we’re testing. But it raises a pretty important question.
Before we decide how much nitrogen to buy, shouldn’t we know how much nitrogen we’ve already got?
And nitrogen wasn’t the only nutrient that raised questions.
Phosphorus gave us another interesting story. Our average P1 test was around 16 parts per million, while the average P2 was around 76 parts per million.
Without getting too far into soil chemistry, the important point is that we have phosphorus present in the soil without having all of it readily available to the plant.
So maybe the answer isn’t always “apply more.” Maybe sometimes the better question is: How do we make use of what’s already there?
That same question about availability led us into some of the other patterns we were seeing with sulfur and calcium.
Our average sulfur result was only about 7.2 parts per million, and very few samples were above the 20 parts per million reference level that we are evaluating.
And calcium adds another layer to the conversation. But it isn’t just a nutrient question.
What we’re thinking about here is soil aggregation, irrigation, water infiltration, root growth, and the environment we’re creating for our soil biology.
When we start putting all of this together, it changes the way you think about a fertility program.
Instead of starting with, “What products are we going to apply?” I think we need to start with four questions:
What do we need to supply that’s deficient?
What can we cycle that’s already present?
What can we do to improve nutrient availability?
And are we accounting for everything that’s already available to the crop?
That’s a very different mindset than simply adding more inputs.
And really, that brings us all the way back to the theme for the Field Day:
Yield is built from the ground up.
It’s the hybrid. It’s the field. It’s the planter. It’s the roots. It’s the soil. It’s fertility. It’s biology. It’s crop protection. And it’s being willing to change our management based on the opportunity Mother Nature actually gives us.
That’s what we’re trying to build with the Max Yield System.
Not a recipe. Not a bigger input package. A system.
And that leaves us with the next question.
If we know the plant, the soil, and the biology matter, how do we actually get those three working together?
At the Field Day, we framed up that opportunity in three pieces: prime the crop, improve the soil environment, and support nutrient cycling.
And that’s where we’re going next.
On the next episode of the EZ Ag Podcast, we’re going to take a deeper look at the Axis Seed NutriBolt product line from AgriGro.
We’ll talk about what those products are, why they fit, and most importantly, why they fit into the bigger Max Yield philosophy.
Because the goal isn’t simply to put more into the system. The goal is to get more out of the opportunity that’s already there.
Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode of the EZ Ag Podcast.
Remember, ag is easy when you tune into the EZ Ag Podcast.
Grow your yield. Grow your legacy. Grow strong with Axis Seed.
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