YOUR TRUSTED AGRICULTURE SOURCE IN THE CAROLINAS SINCE 1974

Georgia Farmer Sets Soybean Yield Record at 206.7 BPA

At 206.7 bushels an acre, that’s a good corn yield for most farms, but for one Georgia farmer, it’s a new soybean yield record. Alex Harrell of southern Georgia explains how he achieved the record.

“A lot of planning and applications. Last year we had corn on this field, we harvested the corn off, and it started that day with residue management and then we pull soil samples, one acre grid samples on every acre, and then we variable rate our lime and gypsum off of that. As far as in season, we choose a variety we want, we’re aa cover crop system, I’ll put a cover crop in the fall, burn that down, and then pre-plant, I apply chicken litter. Then, as far as in-season, we’ll plant, and starting right after emergence at V1, we’ll start pulling tissue samples, and I pull those every Monday. And by Wednesday afternoon, I’ve got those results back, and I make my sprays or my Y-drop applications or sidedress or injection through the irrigation, whatever that application would be next is based off of those tissue samples.” 

Photo by Scott Bauer, USDA Agricultural Research Service

Herrell says BRANDT nutritional’s helped him reach the record.

“100 percent of my foliar was BRANDT applied, whether it was the Smart Trio, Smart Quatro, the B-Mo SmartKB, and what I like about those is the mixability of them because, I mean, there’s a lot of times I’ll have between eight and 14 products in one spray tank, and the trouble I’ve had in the past with other products is they don’t mix well, especially when you get into the foliar fertilizers, you get that much stuff in a tank, and a lot of ours is done with drones which is a low volume, like two to three gallons per acre. So, when you get everything that concentrated in one tank, it usually just made a big gel and we couldn’t spray it out, but the BRANDT stuff, we didn’t have that issue.” 

He says on-farm testing of his own helped him decide to use BRANDT products.

“And a lot of these guys are pulling these tissue samples, and I’m guilty of it too, on a standard practice field, we’ll go pull a tissue sample on it, and it’ll say, okay, we’re low in boron. You know, most people will call their local CoOp, they’ll call three or four different places and they’ll price boron and they’ll just go buy the cheapest ten percent boron around, but they never do a follow up tissue test, you know, a few days later to see if it actually worked or if it didn’t do anything, because if those tissue samples aren’t spiking, I mean it’s not getting into the plant and it’s not working, and that’s where the BRANDT stuff came in. Every time I checked it, the levels of whatever I applied spiked up and that’s what we’re looking for. And on the high yield stuff, you know, I’m not looking for a spike, I’m looking for constant gradual rise. I want to keep it high but on standard fields, you know, we’ve got our levels that we want to maintain, and if we drop below those, we can spike them right back up with the BRANDT products.” 

Learn more about BRANDT online at BRANDT.co.