As the results are in from the National Corn Growers Association 2023 Corn Yield Contest, and once again Isaac Boerema of Pantego, NC is the North Carolina winner in the no-till no-irrigation category.

Yeah, I think it’s typical black land, the mud-based soil, so we’ve got to we have some advantages in terms of the water table and also the moisture-holding capacity that we’ve got in our ground. And then I think the no-till helps with that too, with the traffic ability, but also this past year in particular with a dry start and in the dry middle part of the season, no-till helped us conserve some moisture. And yeah, we saw that when the combines rolled across the field.

Not only good soil, but Boerema says good seed contributed to his yield of 305 bushels per acre.

Yeah, we like the Dekalb hybrids. They farm well for us. We like to generally the early season vigor and we like the plant health. And then the other thing for us is I think the leaf architecture. We’re narrow row, and we’ve tried to pay fairly close attention to the agronomic composition of the different plants in the brands, and the DeKalb ones generally rise to the top for us.

The third element in an award-winning yield is good science, which Boerema tracks and learns from.

Yeah, I think it’s an overall, it’s a total package thing. So we start soil balanced soil pH, we’re starting to pay some more attention to the soil biology, but then you have to be able to start off with a good stand. And if you don’t have that kind of yield potential when the corn comes up, you’re behind the eight ball all season. It’s not that you can’t make a respectable yield, but kind of the championship circle yields don’t come with a skimpy stand.

With a contest field, Isaac says he puts in a little bit of extra effort, but really not that much more than the rest of his 3000 acres.

The thing for us is looking at or maintaining plant health. But it’s not as though it’s a completely different management skew. We’re going to pay closer attention to the contest plot. But really what we’re trying to do with the contest is, figure out what’s works on a small scale to figure out how do we scale it up to go across the farm and how do we take the yields that we see when we take the time to weigh the corn? How do we figure that out and bring it across all of our acres.

Image courtesy Isaac Boerema