Even if you were never the type to peek at your Christmas gifts early, there are few farmers who can help themselves from trying to get a bead on the corn crop coming. Luckily, assessing corn cob development is a useful task at this point in the growing season, as it offers up not only a taste of the bushels to come, but also can teach you a thing or two about variety differences in the field.
In this Corn School episode, Ken Currah, market development agronomist with PRIDE Seeds, offers up examples of assessing maturity differences between hybrid varieties and how to estimate time remaining before harvest. What’s more, Currah explains a few ways to estimate the coming yield to aid in marketing decisions, cautioning that at this point some post-pollination kernels could still abort. As you’ll see in this video, Currah adds a few layers to the yield estimate calculation to ensure you’re not overestimating yield this early in the marketing season.
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