Protecting What We’ve Built

The fifth of our Top 5 Factors to Produce a Top Crop is Post-Planting Management. By August, we have already made a lot of decisions that determine the yield potential of our crop, but our job isn't finished. Post-Planting Management is about continuing to evaluate that potential and making the right decisions to protect it.

This year, that means two very different things depending on which field we're standing in.

Across much of our area, severe drought and weeks of high to record-high temperatures have taken a tremendous toll on dryland corn. Unfortunately, most fields no longer have the yield potential we worked to build last winter and spring. At this point, there aren’t any management decisions we can make that will bring that potential back.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the decisions we made earlier were wrong.

When we built fertility and management plans last winter, we weren't simply trying to spend more money chasing maximum yield. We were trying to maximize the return on every dollar invested while creating the opportunity for greater yield.

That's an important distinction.

Our soil sampling and fertility recommendations are designed with enough of a buffer to build yield potential without requiring us to make every investment up front. Additional applications can be planned throughout the season as the crop tells us whether the potential, and the return, are still there.

This year, dryland acres have told us to stop.

Planned foliar nutrition, fungicide or other later-season applications can simply be removed from the program when drought has taken away the yield potential needed to generate a return. In a difficult year, sometimes good Post-Planting Management isn't deciding what else to apply. It's knowing when not to apply it.

On irrigated corn, the conversation has been very different.

There is still yield potential to protect, and the hot, dry conditions have created tremendous insect and spider mite pressure. Those fields have required us to stay aggressive with scouting and deliberate with our insecticide and miticide decisions.

Even here, however, we're thinking beyond simply controlling the pest in front of us.

One example is our use of Steward® EC for corn rootworm beetle control. Steward gives us the opportunity to knock down rootworm beetles without flaring spider mite populations, an especially important consideration this year. Reducing beetle populations also means reducing the number of females laying eggs in those fields, potentially lowering the rootworm pressure we will face next season.

That information becomes part of another important piece of our Max Yield System: Harvest Evaluation.

What happened in this field this year? What worked? What didn't? What did we learn that should change our decisions next year?

If we've managed rootworm beetles successfully this summer and continue to evaluate that pressure, it may give us an opportunity next spring to pair TS201 with a hybrid that doesn't carry a rootworm trait. That can open the door to genetics we might otherwise have avoided and potentially give us another opportunity to increase yield.

That's what Post-Planting Management is really about.

Maximum yield management doesn't mean maximum inputs. It means continually evaluating the crop, protecting the potential that exists, and investing where we believe there is a return.

And sometimes the decisions we make today aren't just about protecting this year's crop. They're giving us information and creating opportunities to produce an even better crop next year.

Grow Your Yield. Grow Your Legacy. Grow Strong with Axis Seed.