For Virginia farmer David Hula, counting kernels this early in the growing season is unusual, but in a field that’s rooted in testing what’s possible, it’s providing a peek into what may be next.
One of the fields on Hula’s farm is planted to a 75-day corn hybrid, allowing him to explore the potential of harvesting corn in mid-summer and immediately planting another crop.
“We always try something new,” Hula says. “Several years ago, we planted a short-season corn and then planted corn behind it. So we thought, let’s give it a try again, but let’s go corn and double-crop soybeans with it. So this is a 75-day corn. We’re hoping to pick it the first part of middle of July, and then we can still get our soybeans behind that.”
For Hula, the world-record corn grower, every season offers an opportunity to learn something new. While much of his corn crop this season has been challenged by dry conditions across Virginia, one field stands apart. The shorter corn isn’t a problem. Instead, it represents another experiment designed to test what may be possible in the future.
Testing Short-Season Corn to Create New Opportunities
The idea is to maximize productivity by utilizing the entire growing season. Harvesting corn and planting soybeans the very next day presents challenges, but Hula believes the concept deserves another look.
“This is the first time we’ve grown this particular hybrid,” Hula says. “We put it in an environment that it’s not normal and customary to be grown in. I don’t know if we’ll see 300 [bu. per acre], but it looks like we could be in the mid-200s [yield] on this.”
The trial builds on previous experiences with double-cropping. But for Hula, trying something once doesn’t provide a good enough test.
“The first year we did it, we got just right at 300 bushels [per acre] on the first crop,” Hula says. “And then the second crop of corn, we were about 180 bushels. So the goal was to see if we could get 500 bushels in one year with two crops of corn.”
This season, the goals are different, especially with the drought Virginia farmers have been experiencing.
“If we can get 250 on corn and then we can get 60 bushels on soybeans, or 300 on corn and then another 150 to 200 on corn a second time, so it’s just a trial,” Hula says.
Despite drought conditions that have impacted much of Virginia, Hula continues to look ahead.
Innovation Runs Through Generations
Experimentation is not new on the Hula farm. When asked why he continues trying new ideas, Hula points to the generations that farmed here before him.
“My late granddad and my late dad were always innovators, always wanting to try something new,” Hula says.
That willingness to test ideas has helped create an environment where new technologies and management practices are continually evaluated. The operation conducts enough trials that even Hula occasionally loses track of them all.
“So the cool thing with the technology, we got it in our phone. We got it in John Deere Ops Center,” Hula says. “So we sometimes lose track of where we’re doing things, but then there’ll be times my brother or my son will be harvesting something and say, ‘What did you do here?’ And I’ll say, ‘I don’t know, let me go figure it out.’”
Technology has become essential not only for collecting data but also for managing the increasing number of experiments taking place across the farm.
Why the Planter Remains the Most Important Machine
Although many of the newest technologies receive attention, Hula says one of the most important pieces of equipment on the farm is a planter that has been in service for more than a decade.
“This is a 2013 1770,” Hula says. “We did the performance upgrade kit on it about five years ago. So it’s got the bells and whistles, you know, with the brush delivery system, the ExactRate application for the fertilizer.”
While the planter may be 13 years old, Hula says the upgrades have allowed it to remain highly competitive.
“Our focus is to plant the seed, simulate it, space it out, but also get it to come up uniformly,” Hula says. “And there are things that we’ve done to do that. We spend time with the gauge wheels. We spend time with the double-disk openers, making sure they’re correct. And then the closing system.”
“Everybody has their favorite type of closing system. I don’t care what closing system you have. Just make sure it’s working best for you,” says Hula.
The planter has also played a role in some of the farm’s highest-yielding crops. Including one of his most well-known crops, which was the year he grew a 623 bu. per acre corn yield. “We’ve had success in the last several years, but we’ve had this planter since 2013. So any corn crop we’ve had from 2013 on has come from this planter.”
When asked if the planter is the most important technology on the farm, Hula says the answer is simple.
“Well, as a grower, yes,” he says. “If a grower wants to have a 300-bushel crop, you’ve got to have a 300-bushel stand. That’s what drives everything else.”
Hula says modern planter technology has dramatically changed what farmers can do below ground.
“From a planter today, with ExactShot, you can put fertilizer right on the seed, or you can put fertilizer between the seed. We talk about above ground, but we also got to spend time below ground as well,” Hula adds.
He says technologies that precisely place fertilizer or biological products near the seed help establish the crop before it emerges.
“That’s one of the newer technologies from John Deere where it’s just pulsating the fertilizer or biologicals wherever you want it to go, either on the seed or between the seed,” Hula says. “That’s priming the seed. Then we get it up, and then once the crop comes up, we can depend on all the rest of our technologies out there.”
Combines Are Beginning to Think for Themselves
While Hula has kept his planter for more than a decade, he trades combines annually. He says today’s harvest technology is rapidly changing the role of the operator.
“Up until last year, you actually had to have a good operator in a combine harvesting grain because they would have to make adjustments based on crop conditions, based on yield, based on whether this crop was lodging, how much residue was going in,” Hula says.
Today, automation systems are making many of those decisions.
“With some of the technologies, they have the harvest automation program here in the combine where now you can pretty much just put a driver in here,” Hula says.
Operators can select the grain sample they want, and the combine adjusts throughout the field.
“If it sees more broken grain, it’s going to make adjustments on the sieves and the concaves,” Hula says. “If we get more foreign matter, it’s going to make adjustments on the sieves as well.”
He says the technology is also helping reduce grain losses.
“Grain loss, of course, we want as many bushels to go in the grain tank as possible,” Hula says. “Once you get out there and you say, ‘Hey, this is acceptable or not acceptable,’ it’ll make adjustments accordingly.”
The Future: Tracking Every Seed from Planting to Harvest
The next step in precision agriculture may involve tracking every individual seed.
“But you know, now we’re talking about the seed,” Hula says. “I envision down the road this planter or a planter like this is going to say, okay, I dropped this particular seed right here. It’s going to be geo-referenced.”
He believes future sprayers and combines will follow that same individual seed throughout the growing season.
“The sprayer’s going to come across that. It’s going to know that, hey, this is that seed,” Hula says. “And then eventually the combine is going to say, hey, when we go to harvest, we’re harvesting that particular kernel.”
Agriculture has evolved from managing farms as whole units to managing zones within fields.
“In the past, we managed tracts of ground or farms,” Hula says. “Then we got to where we were doing grid soil samples and micromanaging pieces of dirt.”
He believes the next evolution will be even more precise.
“Imagine when you’re managing just a strip of corn or a strip of soybeans from the time you plant all the way to harvest and knowing what’s going on,” Hula says.
Predicting Problems Before Farmers Can See Them
Hula is also experimenting with technologies that identify crop stress weeks before symptoms appear.
“We’re doing some stuff with a company called Crop Diagnostics where we’re taking a leaf hole, punching the sample, sending it out, and it’s reading RNA, not DNA,” Hula says.
The information could provide earlier warnings about plant stress.
“That plant’s telling us three to four weeks before we can visually see it if something’s going wrong,” Hula says.
He says protecting yield may become just as important as increasing it.
“That’s where some of the things are going to come about,” Hula says. “And you say making bushels, it is really protecting those bushels that we have at an earlier stage.”
Closing the Yield Gap
Despite his world-record yields, Hula believes the industry’s biggest opportunity is not setting new records but helping average yields improve.
“We know where some of the high-yield potentials have been,” Hula says. “If you’ve got Randy Dowdy broke 500 bushels and then we’ve gone higher than that, and the country average is 180-some bushels, think about that gap there. That’s what we really need to shrink out.”
He says high-yield farmers have shown what is possible.
“The high-yield guys that are doing the Alex Harrells and the Kip Cullers and Randy Dowdys, that’s cool because now you can see what the potential is,” Hula says. “But now let’s take that information and bring our whole farm average up. That’s where it helps pay the bottom line.”
For a farmer known for producing 600-bushel corn, Hula believes the future of agriculture may be far greater than today’s records. As technology becomes increasingly precise, he says the industry may soon move from managing acres and fields to managing every individual seed planted in the ground.
