49 Thank You for Your Trust & Time, Since 1999 Better Farming | November 2024 Long gone are the days when a single seed company dominated the marketplace with far superior performance. In a typical performance plot of similar maturities, often the top three competing hybrids will be very close together in performance. To help sort out the performance differences, there are many sources a farmer can access: The Ontario Corn Committee trials, seed company performance plots, ag retailer plots, and their own side-by-side trials on their farms. All of these are important sources of selection information. The fact remains that the life cycle of most hybrids on the market is around three years. That means constant turnover, and it may be difficult to get enough information on consistency from a single source. The Ontario Corn Committee trials at gocorn.net offer numerous interactive tools to sort by maturity range, trial locations, and number of years. Such things as yield index, standability, harvest moisture, and test weight can be compared. This may be a useful site to check on how well a particular hybrid has performed over locations and years. However, the timeliness of current year data being available for review on time for seed ordering may be a challenge. Seed corn company plots often have more locations within various maturity ranges and will feature heads-up performance on competing hybrids against their own top-of-the-line hybrids. Most of these performance plots will showcase new hybrids available for next year. Corn companies do a tremendous amount of screening in their selection trials and will always bring their very best to the marketplace. In their own plot work they are looking for consistency and the same things farmers want. The stakes are too high not to bring your best to market. When viewing the company plot results, look to see how they are presenting their data, especially against competing companies. Are they showing only the winning plots, mismatching maturities to gain an upper hand (longer day maturities tend to yield higher), or do they publish all results, win, lose, or draw? The main advantage is that the results are available almost immediately after plot harvest and are publicly available on respective company websites and various social media forums. Local full-service ag retailers and seed dealer plots are another source. These are placed on customers’ farms by either full-service retail farm supply outlets or farmer dealers who are agents for seed companies. These plots are often located on a representative cross-section of soil types and growing conditions. They are very local, and farmers readily identify with the performance of local plots because they may well represent how the hybrids might perform on their own farms. Many of these plots will showcase nearly all locally available hybrids and it is not unusual for these plots to have the most popular competing hybrids grown in them. They are, however, not without some limitations. Seldom is there a check hybrid repeated that can be used to help understand soil variability crops: yield matter$ Consider soybeans with tolerance to sudden death syndrome and white mould. Dale Cowan photo
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