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Growers shifting focus to minimizing losses

A soybean agronomist at the University of Minnesota says farmers need to shift their focus from maximizing yields to minimizing losses.

Seth Naeve says profits the last few years allowed growers to invest in yield.

“Farmers really had an opportunity to put some things in (and) put a lot of products down (to) try and push yields as much as they could when we had high prices.”

Margins are tighter in 2016 and Naeve tells Brownfield soybean growers should look at seed treatments as an area to reduce costs.

“We went from no seed treatments to fungicides to fungicides plus insecticides and then recently it’s been fungicide, insecticide plus some various biologicals.  Those things get to be a lot of money on an acre basis.”

He says the one area growers shouldn’t skimp on is variety selection.

“It’s the most important thing and there’s a lot of range in yield potentials out there, so don’t get stuck with a dog.  Make sure you get high-yielding varieties.  That’s number one, two and three in my book.”

Brownfield spoke to Naeve at the Minnesota Ag Expo in Mankato.