Over the past several years we’ve seen a consistent trend of increasing soybean yields in Illinois. While admittedly there can be a lot of frustrations in soybean management, there are also several strategies that have emerged to increase the likelihood of soybean success, year in and year out. This webinar will focus on the practices that have emerged from years of research and working with high yield growers across the U.S. We hope viewers will walk away with a clearer picture of how to continue capitalizing on the opportunities that exist with greater soybean management.

1 CEU in Crop Management (CM)

Presenter: AJ Woodyard, Technical Crop Production Specialist, BASF

• Planting date
• Row spacing
• Variety (MG) selection
• Rethink seeding rates
• Plant nutrition
• Seed treatment (and inoculant)
• Residual herbicides
• Priaxor® + Fastac®

• More pods per acre
• More seeds per pod
• More weight per seed

• Year in and year out the biggest way to set a foundation for larger yields is by planting earlier
• Chilling injury – used to think we needed to have soil temps above 50 degrees in first 24 hours to avoid yield drags
• By planting earlier we can get flowering before the summer solstice, more days in the early reproductive stages and the plant can put on more nodes per plant, which influences more pods per acre
• Getting more GDU’s with early planting
• With soybeans uniformity of emergence is not as important as corn, but you need to balance stand uniformity with light harvesting
• What’s changed?
  • More consistent rain in June and July
  • Agronomic improvements

• If you crowd too many plants in early you get spindly stems, because they don’t have the ability to capture as much light
• With early planting, go with lower seeding rates
• With mid planting date there’s not much difference between early and late maturity group

• Even in earliest planting dates, narrow rows performed better
• Sacrificed some of early planting benefits with wider row placing
• Seeding rates isn’t where you are going to find a lot of additional bushels
• Saw more benefit with narrow rows; the light capture around June 21 is really important