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Illinois Yield Challenge winners announced

Winners of the Illinois Soybean Association’s inaugural Yield Challenge were announced this week in Chicago. The contest was held with the goal of finding ways to increase soybean yields. Soybean yields aren’t increasing as fast as growers and researchers would like, according to Jim Nelson, coordinator of the Yield Challenge.

“So this is a program where farmers go out into the field and do real world situations with plots side-by-side so that it has some real relationship to what they’re farming with,” said Nelson, in an interview with Brownfield.

The goal of the competition is to increase yields by 1.5 percent, while accumulating data to assist researchers and other growers.

“What we have learned so far is that we have probably a couple to three more weeks of really crunching some data to come up with some good analysis,” said Nelson. “We’re going to be reviewing a lot of that at our regional meetings throughout the state starting the end of January.”

There were 40 teams competing this year, and Nelson says there are already teams who’ve indicated they want to participate in next year’s Yield Challenge.

Although there are nine districts in Illinois, Nelson said the two southern-most districts, Eight and Nine, suffered weather issues causing their Yield Challenge plots to be unusable.

The results of the remaining seven districts:

District 1 – First Place: Syngenta District 1 Team – Syngenta

District 2 – First Place: Elburn Coop High Yield Team – Pioneer; Second Place: Pioneer LJ1J Team – Pioneer

District 3 – First Place: CPS Ferris Team – BASF; Second Place: NK District 3 Team – Syngenta

District 4 – First Place: Sunrise Ag Service Team – BASF; Second Place: Agland FS Team – BASF

District 5 – First Place: Syngenta Seeds District 5 Team – Syngenta; Second Place: Channel District 5 Team – Channel Bio, LLC / Monsanto

District 6 – First Place: Shipman Elevator Team – BASF; Second Place: Effingham Equity Team – Effingham Equity

District 7 – First Place: East Illinois Challenge Team – BASF; Second Place; Effingham Equity Team – Effingham Equity

AUDIO: Jim Nelson (8 min. MP3)

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