84 Ontario Ag Marketplace Better Farming | October 2024 Cropping time has passed and harvest time is upon us. Now is the time for you to count or guestimate your potential yield for your fall harvest 2024. We are all thinking about the big harvest, harvesting our soybeans and corn. Is it a big crop average crop or a poor volume crop. The final numbers we live with are what goes across the scales or what goes through the combine. Wouldn’t it be nice to know ahead, of the approximate yield number? A lot of company sales reps and crop advisors will give you a number of bu. / ac., but if it’s wrong, they were only guessing. A University of Ottawa Professor has some students working on a program to give the crop yield. Several drone companies are flying over crops and giving a yield count number. At the moment they are all only guessing. Farmers can count their own crop potential by the following GPS Ontario’s method. Step 1 - Measure a linear distance of 17’ 5” with a cord or light rope. Step 2 - Count the stocks of corn in that 17’5’ distance. If the count is 32 stalks, you have 32,000 stalks per ac. This is good information is your planter was set up to plant 34000 plants per ac. You have a 94% planting yield return. Or you have 6% combination of seed germination and planter seed misses. We have counted a lot of fields and this is quite normal. Walking through the same patch of corn with this knowledge you can see these results. But we haven’t got a yield count. Almost every crop advisor will say, 34 stalks gives 34,000 cobs and that works out to ?????? bushels of corn, that make up ???? ton of corn. No it doesn’t. What about the second cob on the plant? Does it have any kernels that get harvested and added to the grain tank? “YES”! Why are we not counting them as well? What about the cobs that have puffed up with smut they went through the combine but added nothing to the grain tank. Walk back down through the row of corn, counting all the full length cobs that will be going through the combine. In my case we have many stalks with two full length cobs attached, and a small additional sucker further down. We counted 43 cobs, that is 26% more crop than we planted for. We now have a positive cob count to work with. Pull six cobs. This is .00017 of the crop, which matches the distance in feet of the guide string. With husks peeled off, the cob count has how many rows of kernels? This could be 14, 16, 18, 20, and as high as 22. Eighteen rows is the most common. Count how many kernels long there are on each of the six cobs. These should be higher than 34, and commonly as high as 40+. Once again average the six cobs, and come up with a number. Example 38. You now have the info to calculate your yield. Number of cobs counted (43). Number of kernels per cob (18 x 38 = 684) x 43,000 cobs per ac. = 29,412,000. Divide by 100,000 seeds per bushel = 294.12 bu. Divide by 40 bu. / tonne = 7.35 tonne. The 100,000 factor also allows data room for moisture content at harvest time. The formula looks like this. (cob count) x (average kernel count) on cob, divided by 100,000, divided by 40 bu. / tonne, 43 x 684 x 43,000 / 100,000 / 40 = metric tonnes harvested. It was interesting when a yield check was recently done on my corn and soybean crop. The reps admitted that they didn’t have a good way of calculating soybean yield. According to them, I had an average of 60 bean pods on the plant so I had a 60 bu crop. Sorry folks but that doesn’t work for me Being more data conscious and yield savvy, my way of checking the yield is: measure out the number of stocks / plants that grew in the 17’5” plot line, pull 3 plants, remove the pods from each plant counting the pods and then the seeds per pod, multiply those numbers to come up with the number of beans per plant, times the number of plant growing = ???,???,???. Divide the number by 100,000 to get the bushels per ac., and divide that number by 40 to get the tonns per ac. This year I will verify my method of pre-calculating my soybean yield. It looks like a great crop and I think it will yield higher than the 60 bu prediction. I have checked the pod count several times, and most times it is higher than 60. We will see what the yield is when the crop is harvested. That will be the real answer. Cropping time is harvest time, is counting time, and data collecting is beautiful knowledge on which to base your future cropping practices! GROW MORE WITH LESS by MORLEY WALLACE GPS Ontario HARVEST TIME IS COUNTING TIME 2024 Office: 613-489-2932 | TF: 613-489-2932 | www.gpsontario.ca 6558 3rd Line Road South, North Gower, Ontario Morley J. Wallace Mobile 613-229-6375 Morley@gpsontario.ca Jordan J. Wallace Mobile 613-327-6377 Jordan@gpsontario.ca
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