Farm Progress

Crop Watch 2015: Make our email box overflow with corn yield guess entries this week!

Tom Bechman, Editor, Indiana Prairie Farm

September 11, 2015

2 Min Read
Crop Watch 2015: Make our email box overflow with corn yield guess entries this week!

You've paid attention to our reports all season. You've read about the Crop Watch 2015 field in the magazine as well. Now is the time to cash in. Put your corn ingenuity to work and guess the yield to the nearest tenth of a bushel, based on dry bushels. You are guessing the yield for the entire Crop Watch 2015 field.

Crop Watch 9/7: Corn fights harder than you think for top yields

Send your guess to: [email protected] by 11:59 p.m. EDT on Sept. 15. One guess per person, and one guess per immediate household, please. Winners of the 2014 Crop Watch contest are not eligible.

Three winners will be recognized in Indiana, three in Michigan and three in Ohio. The closest guess wins eight bags of Seed Consultants, Inc., hybrid seed corn for 2016. Second place winner in each state gets six bags of seed. The third place winner receives four bags of seed.

Include your cell phone, home phone, physical address, and number of acres of each crop grown when you submit the entry. Only entries will all that information noted may be accepted.

Meanwhile, here's a quick review of the season where the field is located to help you with your guess.

The season was on the cool, wet side, but due to a window in the weather, the field was planted May 5 in good condition. Two hybrids were planted, each in 12 boxes of the 24-row planter. The goal was to spread pollen shed by using hybrids with slightly different flowering times. The farmer also wanted to compare the two hybrids over the entire field.

corn-close-up.jpg

Time to decide: A third party who hadn't seen the field all year recently checked the field and proclaimed it 'good corn.' How good is up to you to guess!

Rainfall was nearly perfect until the third week of June, and the area looked like a garden spot. Then 10 or more inches fell in the next three weeks. The field was saturated, but plants were big enough that they weren't impacted like some other fields in other locations.

Crop Watch 9/4: Stalk rot: Coming to a field near you

The crop began to show signs of gray leaf spot early, and was sprayed with a fungicide during the early stages of silking. Even so, gray leaf spot impacted both hybrids, though both are supposed to be tolerant to the disease.

Lesions reached the top leaves of both hybrids by mid-August, but did not worsen over the last half of the month.

Yield checks from one ear put the yield somewhere in the 170 to 210 bushel per acre range. However, the whole field has not been sampled.

Make your best guess and maybe you can cut into your input costs for next year!

About the Author(s)

Tom Bechman

Editor, Indiana Prairie Farm, Indiana Prairie Farmer

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