For years, Stephen Butz watched his corn yields climb while his soybeans stalled. The numbers didn’t lie: corn was steadily improving, while soybeans were “average at best,” he recalls, running hot and cold from year to year with no clear pattern.
“Our soybeans were just plateauing,” says Butz, who farms near Kankakee, Ill.
The turning point for Butz came several years ago on a 120-acre field split between two soybean varieties — 80 acres on the north side and 40 acres on the south. Everything matched: planting date, field conditions, management. The only difference was the variety planted.
At harvest, the 40-acre section of the field was 18 to 19 bushels per acre better.
A talk with Butz’s seedsman revealed the answer: the higher-yielding soybeans carried the Peking source of resistance to soybean cyst nematode (SCN). That single difference explained nearly 20-bushels-per-acre the farm had been losing to SCN for years.
“Honestly, it was just one of those deals where our seed guy had said, ‘Hey, this is a good number.’ So we’d planted the variety kind of naively,” Butz says. “But lo and behold, it was a huge benefit for us and showed us a problem we had on this farm and other farms, too.”
With the initial finding of SCN, Butz started soil testing to identify how significant the problem was across his farm. Surprisingly, soil tests revealed SCN populations ranging from the low hundreds to as high as 5,000 per sample.
“We’ve got a good amount of farms in that 3,000 to 5,000 count, which is an extremely high amount that I need to address,” says Butz, who samples fields ahead of planting.
Spring 2026: Going 100% Peking
After splitting acres for several years between non-GMO and Enlist soybeans, Butz made a decisive shift to the latter for 2026 as the non-GMO soybeans do not carry resistance to SCN.
“This spring, we are going with 100% Peking,” he says
For Butz, the move is less about chasing bonus bushels of soybeans and more about stopping the hidden losses SCN has been causing. He’s certain he’s left a lot of yield potential on the table in previous seasons.
“We’re not so much adding bushels (with the Peking) as we expect to relieve the stress that’s been taking bushels away,” he says.
Going all-Peking this season is only part of his management plan. The other piece is rotating more between corn and soybeans and, over time, between different SCN technologies, including Peking and PI 88788.
Butz’s cropping pattern follows a rough structure of thirds in any given year: about a third of his total acres in corn or soybeans and another third in continuous corn. That same structure drives his soil sampling schedule and will, in the future, he says, guide how he rotates SCN resistance traits across the landscape.
He also hopes to bring new technology into the mix, including the new SCN solution on the way from BASF Agricultural Solutions, called Nemasphere. It is the first-ever biotech trait designed specifically to address SCN.
Unlike traditional native resistance found in PI 88788 and Peking, Nemasphere is based on a transgenic trait — a Cry14 protein engineered directly into the soybean — explains Hugo Borsari, BASF vice president of business management for seeds in North America.
Beyond Yield: Logistics And Longevity
For Butz, the case for more soybeans, and especially better-protected soybeans, isn’t just agronomic. It’s logistical and financial.
Soybeans help spread out workload during planting and harvest, he explains, easing the strain of managing continuous corn acres. They also inject rotation into fields that might otherwise lean too heavily to continuous corn.
“Years of continuous corn in some spots is fine, but rotation is obviously better,” he said during a recent panel discussion hosted by BASF.
Like he found out by accident, Butz says he believes many other growers might be losing significant yield to SCN without realizing it.
“You might live in an area that you raise 75-bushel beans all the time, or 80-bushel beans, and that’s amazing. But what if the potential is 90 or 100 bushels?“ Butz asks. “There’s plenty of people out there that might be losing 10, 15 bushels off the top, and that adds up fast. You’re freaking losing $100 an acre pretty quick that would help a lot with your bottom line.”
