In between fields or while waiting on rain this harvest, take a few minutes to evaluate the opposite end of the growing season. Planter performance and uniformity is a story well told by looking at the final ear count and confirmation.
“What we are tracking is emergence and how things came up across the planter,” said Farm Journal Field Agronomist Missy Bauer of B&M Crop Consulting while pointing to ears lined up along their corresponding rows. “What we have represented here is our 1000th of an acre.”
Bauer says it’s clear, even in one 16 row planter pass, not every unit is uniform.
“So our goal would be that from row 1 down to row 16, everything would be relatively the same,” said Bauer. “But you can see that there’s a lot of variability in here.”
Some rows show different size cobs, others, despite a plant and a tassel, are missing ears. That puts the row, in her example, at a population of 23,000 ears per acre. Bauer says results like that are going to show up on the yield monitor.
“That’s is basically yield loss that we’re going to be experiencing due to the lack of uniformity of emergence out in this field on this particular planter,” said Bauer. “Our ideal situation for uniformity across the planter is that all of these rows look the same in that they all yield within a certain amount of one another.”
She recommends taking the time to evaluate stand performance this fall to better inform agronomic or equipment decisions for next growing season.
