Kevin Kalb has broken the 400 bushel per acre mark on corn various times on test plots on his Dubois, Indiana farm. The 12-time NCGA Yield Contest winner says the competition pushes him to try new things. He says, “So you know a lot of guys don’t like don’t believe in yield contests. But I’ll tell you what, that’s where you learn what hybrids like corn responds to by doing different by pushing the envelope. I mean we probably kill 10, 15 acres every year. I’ve tried certain nutrients to know what’s too much and what’s not enough, so we do our fair share of testing on our farm.”
Kalb says they also run their own hybrid plots and various on-farm trials and are relentless in their search for higher yields. “If there’s something new out there that we think can give us a loosen the arm you know on these yields we tried, you know and normally we tried two years in a row before we take it to the rest of the farm acres.”
Blue Mound, Illinois farmer Alex Head says it’s important to run a host of side-by-side trials on his farm to keep up with the ever-changing environment. “Things change so you’ve got to be on the leading edge of changing and looking at new practices. So, every year we usually try something different.”
This year that included planting earlier maturing beans. Head says, “To be honest they were some of our better yielding beans so far. So yeah, I’m looking at planting some more early beans next year and getting those done early.”
And with the 2022 harvest is in the rear-view mirror, Head says he’ll evaluate all the data from their trials to determine the hits and misses. “Once we’re done with harvest, we’ve got yield maps and all that and we’ll list down and look at yield maps and planting maps and compare them and see what happens, see what we like, see what we didn’t like and go from there.”
Leading land grant universities are also helping farmers crack the high yield code through their research. Mark Licht, Extension Cropping Systems Specialist with Iowa State University says, “So, one of the things that I’m working with is a national project, working with Science for Success with soybean agronomists from across the US. And we’re looking at basically, using nitrogen and sulfur that can help us improve nitrogen fixation in that soybean plant.” He says it’s still early, but the data is already showing some important trends. “We can apply a little bit of sulfur and it doesn’t necessarily hurt the nitrogen fixation in the soybean plant. But if we applied too much nitrogen in particular, that will drastically decrease you know, that nitrogen fixation that occurs within the plants.”
Licht says Iowa State has a network of growers across the state conducting on farm trials on new products, practices and technology to find the recipe for high yields.
