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Michigan grower reaching for 500 bushels also takes home soybean win

One of the nation’s top-yielding corn farmers says he’s just a student of the crop. 

For 20 years, mid-Michigan farmer Don Stall has competed in the National Corn Growers Association Yield Contest with a goal of hitting 500 bushels.  Despite the ebb and flow of drought and flooding conditions in 2021, he harvested 465.7 bushels on conventional irrigated land.

“Our crops never looked like they were stressed, they always looked like they were really healthy,” he says.

It was his fourth, first-place finish within the contest.  Stall also had the state’s largest yield on conventional non-irrigated land and topped Michigan Soybean Association’s yield contest.

“We had the best bean yields and the best corn yields ever for dryland, irrigated suffered a little bit from past years but overall pretty good,” he shares.

His secret continues to be tissue sampling and feeding contest crops throughout the season.  Those plots are the most profitable for the 3,500-acre farm.

“We’re expecting returns of $1,200 to $1,500 profit per acre,” he says.

Stall says he’s also experimenting with more products to improve fertilizer efficiencies during a time of high prices but a profitable margin for 2022 has already been locked in for the year.

Brownfield interviewed Stall about his season during the Great Lakes Crop Summit.

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