It's all about the yield!

By GARY BROCK

gbrock@recordherald.com

Bob Nielsen from Pur­due Uni­ver­sity told Ohio farm­ers in Jan­u­ary that 300-bushel an acre yield could become the “norm” sooner than we think — as long as farm­ers under­stand what can affect the yield, what they can con­trol and what they can do about those factors.

Will a time come when south­ern Ohio corn farm­ers see a yield of 300 bushels an acre? And not just as a fluke or excep­tion but har­vest after harvest?

It is not a ques­tion of if this will hap­pen, but how soon, says Pur­due Uni­ver­sity Agron­omy pro­fes­sor Bob Nielsen.

Nielsen says that for Ohio farm­ers, it will be all about the yield, and what will hap­pen in com­ing years to increase that yield to reach the “magic” 300 bushel an acre number.

In Jan­u­ary, Nielsen and other agri­cul­ture experts held sem­i­nars in Fayette County to dis­cuss the issue of crop yield and what can be done to increase it.

He said that obtain­ing a 300 bushel an acre yield is “doable” even today, point­ing out that this has hap­pened in “yield com­pe­ti­tions” in the south­east where the win­ner has bro­ken the 300 bushel mark.

But, for a nor­mal har­vest in a nor­mal year, such a yield may hap­pen in 30 years — or less.

“We have seen that when things change, advance, they hap­pen much faster than expected. So the 30-year pre­dic­tion may not hap­pen. It could be sooner,” he said.

Nielsen said the “sooner” will depend on many things — and some of them are things the Ohio farm­ers can con­trol, and some are things over which they have no control.

The biggest “no con­trol” of course is the weather.

And that leads to the biggest chal­lenge he sees for farm­ers — stress.

Not the stress on the farm­ers them­selves (although that is very much an issue), but stress on the stalks of corn as they grow.

This stress comes from changes in the weather and “and all other fac­tors that impact our yield,” he says.

“We need to iden­tify and man­age the yield-limiting fac­tors that we DO have con­trol over.”

He says that the best grain yield starts with four things the farm­ers can do:

1. Get­ting the stand off to a healthy start at knee-height early in the season;

2. Once the stand is healthy knee-high, then main­tain it season-long;

3. Spend time in the field mon­i­tor­ing the crop; and

4. Pay atten­tion to the details.

Regard­ing all the “tech­nol­ogy and advance­ments in farm­ing” Nielsen point­ing out that in the his­tory of corn grow­ing there have really been just two major advances since 1866 — double-cross hybrid seeds in the 1930s and fol­lowed by the devel­op­ment of single-cross hybrids and other changes in the 1950s.

Those events caused a spike in corn yield every year. He said this third “mir­a­cle” will likely be biotech­nol­ogy, genetic engi­neer­ing and mol­e­c­u­lar breed­ing tech­niques that will boost the yield up to that magic 300 bushel range at some point in the future.

But for today, Nielsen says that what corn grow­ers should not do is wait for that “third mir­a­cle” of tech­nol­ogy to sud­denly boost corn yield. “Maybe what is a real­is­tic goal for most of us is to strive to improve our abil­ity to grow pretty good corn more con­sis­tently year in and year out,” he said.

That alone will help boost yield.

“Con­sis­tency is the key, he says. And the enemy of con­sis­tent grow­ing is — weather, and the stress weather puts on crops. Regard­less of how we feel about global warm­ing, Nielsen says there is no doubt that “our cli­mate is chang­ing, and there is more extreme weather.”

He said there are yield influ­enc­ing fac­tors that farm­ers can con­trol to help increase pro­duc­tion. One fac­tor is seed hybrid selec­tion. “It is impor­tant to select a hybrid that will do good every year, with a wide range of tol­er­ance every year,” he said,.

How does a corn grower select the best hybrid? Nielsen said for farm­ers to check and eval­u­ate a vari­ety of trial results from a num­ber of loca­tions and sources.

“Choose hybrids whose yields are at least 90% that of the high­est yield­ing hybrids in almost every vari­ety trial you can find,” he said. And don’t count on any­one else to tell you what is best, he added — check the results yourself.

He also pointed out that tillage (ver­ti­cal or no-till for exam­ple); types of fer­til­izer and when to use; crop rota­tion; nitro­gen man­age­ment and of course, dis­ease and insect man­age­ment also play major roles in crop yield.

“It’s not rocket sci­ence,” he said. Just iden­tify and tar­get the yield issues and man­age them.

And 300 bushels an acre may not be far away.

(Gary Brock is edi­tor of ACRES of South­west Ohio.)

Posted by Tina Murdock on Feb 24 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.