From the Fields: Rients begins test plot harvest

We harvested my two corn test plots Sept. 25. Technically, this is a corn-on-soybean plot because we broke the cycle of corn-on-corn last year. It will go back into a corn-on-corn plot next year. I do the corn-on-corn plots because there’s not a lot of people that do that and it works out well in this three-acre patch that we’ve got. It matches the corn-on-soybean plot size perfectly, so it works out really well.

Both of my companies — LG Seeds and Golden Harvest — are here helping today. Hopefully, after the hurricane remnants go through this weekend and we get things dried out, all of our soybeans will be ready. We’ll take the soybean test plots out next and then we’ll get going on our fields.

This corn test plot was planted April 22, before the rain and cold weather we got that caused emergence issues for some people. We had a couple of hybrids that we thought were going to have emergence issues and we couldn’t collect data, but everything came up well enough that we can collect data off of it.

I did plant some soybeans in the plots before the late April rain, but they’re 4.0 maturity and aren’t ready yet. They’ll be really good because they collected some of that rain we’ve been getting when they were still green and hopefully will put on a little extra size and weight.

Data is collected in my yield monitor, but we also use weigh wagons for accuracy. I can see each of the hybrids on the yield map. I know where that spot was where it emerged a little bit late, and it will be interesting to see how much yield difference there will be in there. Maybe it’ll be better, but I doubt it with the late emergence.