11/21/06 Soybean Yield Winner

Soybean Yield Winner. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Kip Cullers is a grower in southwest Missouri who takes his farming seriously. That's why he entered his soybean crop in the Missouri Soybean Association Yield Contest this year. Not only did Cullers win - but with 139 bushels - he set a new world record with the Pioneer brand soybean variety 94M80. That's despite untimely rains at the beginning of the season and a hot, dry summer. CULLERS: We had planted 300-thousand and the thing about soybeans is if you cut your population back to the bare minimum rate you can sure get yourself in trouble, shoot yourself in the foot so to speak if you don't get a good stand and we had a little trouble even getting them out of the ground. We got a pounding rain on them right after we planted them and we ended up right about a 245-thousand final plant stand and averaged 120 pods per plant and that's a relatively conservative number. We had plants out there that had as much as 360 pods per plant. So how did Cullers do it? Well - the award winning crop was grown in a sandy loam soil in Newton County, Missouri. And according to Pioneer Agronomist Greg Luce - Cullers did something that made a huge difference - he treated his soybean crop a lot like his main crop - green beans. LUCE: In Kip's case, he wanted to do everything he could to try to achieve a high yield so he planted the variety at a high population, higher than is typically done in the area. He cut the rate of water that he gave these beans back and gave them a lot of incremental watering. Kip did apply fungicides to protect against disease and insecticide to protect against bean leaf beetle and grasshopper from feeding on those pods so he treated them a little differently than what is typically done raising irrigated soybeans in Missouri and it worked very well for him. Luce says Cullers' success with Pioneer's soybean variety has been a real eye-opener - not just about how high soybean yields can be - but also practices and ideas other growers might want to utilize. But if you ask Cullers - he'll tell you it's important to start with great yield potential - and from there - he says the secret to his success isn't anything out of the ordinary. CULLERS: Just a lot of luck I'd say and good genetics and out here you know trying to make stuff happen. We walk out fields every day and make sure we don't have any issues coming up. We impose a lot of our stuff off of our vegetable operation into our soybeans and our corn. We try and stay one step ahead of everything on problems that arise from time to time. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.