Agronomy

Traits are the alphabet soup of letters and numbers listed after a hybrid’s number. It is so confusing that Michigan State has a two-page document to help explain and break down the differences in insect traits to practicing agronomists. What makes this business so complicated beyond the various input and output traits, is the fact it’s constantly evolving; in the last two years, we have seen big shifts in herbicide traits with Enlist™ and XtendFlex® soybeans. Now it is corn’s turn: there are many new corn traits on the near horizon from Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta.

By: Mark Stutsman, COO

As we prepare for the upcoming growing season, many of us are left to ponder, ‘what has made fertilizer so precious?’

Fertilizer pricing today is a complicated matter with many players sitting at the table: world markets (the big bully), energy costs and clean air initiatives (the cousins), supply and demand (the married couple), trade restrictions and tariffs (our friends from the East Coast) and freight rates (the mover and shaker).

A friendship and a partnership. Since the late 70s, Galen Mears and Ron Stutsman have been friends and partners in business. That’s also about the same time that Galen built his first portable liquid poly-phosphate processing unit to make ammonium phosphate fertilizers – the reason there’s a big cloud of steam coming from our campus a few times every year.

After 31 years, Tom Sieren is hanging up his hat as our anhydrous ammonia facilities manager.

By: Chase Gingerich, ProVantage Specialist and Agronomy Sales

Managing nitrogen is the most important nutrient for optimizing corn yields. Mismanaged nitrogen is the most expensive nutrient program for a grower to get wrong. Too little nitrogen and you have shorted your corn yield. Too much nitrogen and you have wasted your money and a nutrient that has potential to cause environmental issues. How can we be sure that we are the most efficient with our applied nitrogen? Timing and placement.

As harvest continues and bins are filled, planning for next year is already upon us. One decision to make sooner rather than later is whether to apply anhydrous ammonia (NH₃) this fall or wait until spring.

We’re often asked why we offer row crop seed from four different companies: Dekalb/Asgrow (Bayer), Agrigold (AgReliant), Brevant (Corteva), and Stine. Why would we want to offer seed from so many companies? Ultimately it boils down to genetic diversity and parent lines.

Just like that summer is over and our agronomy interns are headed back to Iowa State University to start their sophomore year. Before Derick Sandburg and Bryce Waters return to lectures and textbooks, we caught up with them as they reflected on their summer crop scouting internship.