What agronomic ideas can help you Win the Furrow next season? Today, we look at how to pump up yields by focusing on ear flex in corn.
Crop-Tech Consulting Agronomist Isaac Ferrie says farmers never want to walk away from a crop in season. “And even if things have gone against us most of the season, some of these corn hybrids have so much potential and kernel depth and so much variation and kernel depth that there’s a lot of yield to be made later in the season, you know, even if the front half hasn’t gone against us. So we know all year flex, but they can flex and girth the rose around, they can flex in length and they can flex in kernel depth.”
Ferrie says some hybrids have a tendency to flex in certain areas over others. “So maybe more likely to flex in girth, more likely the flex in length or depth than some others. And and one of the things that we look at is trying to figure that out. And then once we figure that out, we know when it happens. So girth. Girth is being established somewhere in that v4, v6 frame. Well, if we have a hybrid that that’s susceptible to flexing and girth, that V4, V6 time frame becomes very important.”
Farmers need to make sure the corn crop has a good day says Ferrie. “We don’t want it to be deficient any nutrient during that time frame, you know, getting it off to a good start planting and good warm conditions and starter fertilizer are how we ensure that it doesn’t flex downward during that that stage if we have a hybrid that predominantly flexes and kernel depth that you know that’s happened the last 40 days of the season. So being on top of our late season in applications, making sure we have enough water, staying on top of the fungicide applications become pretty important because that’s when that hybrid is most susceptible to stress as we get to later season.”
Ferrie also recommends growers do everything they can to mitigate stress during that critical growth stage. “Especially if that’s where it’s most susceptible to to truncating yield. Overall, when we look at the hybrids flex, we always think of flex as flexing down. Whereas if we flex in length, we’re flexing backwards. So we had a high genetic potential for that year. And then as it’s stressed, it starts limiting how long that year’s going to become. So low populations don’t cause the ear to flex up. Low populations just allow that ear to get closer to what the genetic potential of that ear was to begin with, because we alleviated stress by reducing the populations. As we increase populations, we increase a little bit of stress in there and then we’ll start to truncate, whether it’s rows around or whether it’s length, because we increase stress, it’s going to start to work its way down. But flex, flex kind of always happens on the downward movement, not the upward movement. And so that flex could be a key. It could be associated with risk. Right? So a high flex hybrid means under stress. It’s going to start to move down. And if we have flex and girth, that’s that’s where our risk time is, right. That V4 to V6 is when we have a risk of flexing down and girth. We’ve got to keep it happy.”
