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NCGA yield winner also breaks soybean record
This year’s National Corn Growers Association yield winner put up more than 470 bushels per acre and broke record soybean yields despite extreme wet and dry conditions in Michigan.
Don Stall entered his first yield contest in 2003 with 218-bushel corn, this year he harvested 477 bushels to the acre. “It’s everything from the equipment and calibrations, fertility, and we assembled a team of a couple of agronomists that we work with and our seed representative.”
The Mid-Michigan farmer grows nearly 2,500 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat, but dedicates plots each year specifically for yield contests. For soybeans, Stall says 2018 was his best year ever and will be recognized as record setting in the Michigan Soybean Yield Contest. “This year our dry land plot was 124.75—that’s the best we’ve ever done.”
But the season wasn’t easy after receiving eight inches of rain in May. “Everything we planted after the 4th of May we had to rip up and replant at the end of May, 1st of June. We had to manage two crops, both in corn and soybeans the entire season.”
Stall says he then went till the end of August without any rain which then never seemed to stop, and pushed the end of harvest into December.
AUDIO: Brownfield interview with Don Stall during the Great Lakes Crop Summit, in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.
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