The 2025 corn crop is shaping up to be one of the best Glen Grimm and his family have grown in recent memory.
“We’re looking at a tremendous crop,” says Grimm, who farms with three of his brothers in northwest Kansas.
Grimm was upbeat about the family’s corn crop early on this spring, thanks to ideal planting and growing conditions. A potential yield setback in one field resulting from tight tassel wrap at pollination did little to quell his enthusiasm.
“We can still see a few places in the one field where [tight tassel wrap] occurred, but it’s not going to be a yield-limiting issue for us,” he says.
Grimm attributes his family’s pollination success to two management practices:
- Their decision to grow a range of hybrid maturities each year
- The practice of using a split planter
“It’s not uncommon for one of our fields to have six different hybrids, though we don’t plant multiple hybrids in every field,” he says. “We like the risk management that gives us. If one hybrid gets hit by disease or something, hopefully the others won’t.”
Mitigating risk by using a mix of hybrid maturities in the field is a recommendation Farm Journal Field Agronomist Ken Ferrie routinely makes.
“Designate hybrids as early, medium and late-maturing for your area,” he advises. “Put half to two-thirds of hybrids in the maturity group that works the best on your acres, then split the remaining acres between the other two.”
For the planting process, plant early hybrids first and the full-season ones last. This approach will stagger corn pollination and your harvest window.
“If you do it the other way around, planting from the longest to the shortest, you’ll end up pollinating and reaching harvest on the same date, meaning you had no risk mitigation,” Ferrie says.
Sync Up At Silking
Ferrie believes a split planter strategy helped some growers in his area, central Illinois, avoid tight tassel wrap.
“If the farmers had a split planter, and the hybrids synced up in silking, [they] were able to mitigate some of the risk, because the one hybrid pollinated the other one for you,” he says.
Champion corn grower David Hula routinely uses a split planter. Typically, he splits his 16-row planter with two hybrids, but this year, he used three.
His approach is to plant hybrids in a field with similar comparative relative maturities (CRMs) but with different flowering dates. This is information he says you can access via seed company product catalogs or your representative.
Assessing growing degree units (GDUs) in the flowering process also plays a role.
“If I’m using the same genetic package from the same company, we’ll look for a six-day range of pollination,” he notes. “If I’m changing companies, we try to find when they’re silking and come up with their best strategy.”
Grimm says his family splits their 24-row planter with two hybrids.
“We might do something like put a 115-day hybrid next to a 118-day hybrid; we try to keep them close which helps with harvest,” Grimm explains.
Straightforward Process
Grimm says the practice of going with a split planter is fairly simple, thanks to using Central Commodity System delivery with bulk-fill capability.
“We put one hybrid in the right box, and one hybrid in the left, making sure to label them for our records,” he notes.
While the brothers plant with a 24-row planter, they actually harvest with a 12-row head.
We’re able to harvest the hybrids separately because of our header and planter match-up,” Grimm says. “It works well and is a pretty simple process.”
