“Looked Good from Day One”
David Klaus, a Mycogen Seeds customer from Carlinville, Ill., continues to choose Mycogen
® brand hybrids because he values high-yielding genetics, agronomic expertise and advanced seed technologies, including new Mycogen SmartStax
®, which he incorporated into his cropping program in 2010.
“We just wanted a taste of it to see what it was all about,” Klaus says.
Klaus, a 10-year Mycogen Seeds customer, typically plants a plot of several Mycogen brand hybrids every year. In 2010, he planted 55 acres of Mycogen SmartStax
2K594, and took notice of how it compared to other Mycogen brand hybrids on his farm in Illinois.
“We had better germination, percent wise, than some of the other hybrids [with the SmartStax],” he says. “It basically jumped out of the ground — it looked good from Day One.”
The SmartStax hybrid also looked healthier than the other corn Klaus had in his plots, which he attributes to the genetics of the Mycogen hybrid, as well as to the new SmartStax corn trait.
“Once it germinated and came up, it had a better population than a lot of the other corns. It looked good all year long,” he says.
While Klaus says the insect pressure he typically sees from rootworm and corn borers was less this past season, he believes there are going to be years when having the added protection of SmartStax® is really going to pay off.