The key to a successful growing season is advanced preparation. Early hybrid selection and ordering helps to give the best hybrid selection and maximize the yield potential on your farm. Agronomist Jon Erickson offers seven steps on selecting the right grain corn hybrids for your acres.

A corn rootworm (CRW) beetle infestation can decimate corn yield. They have a keen ability to adapt to control strategies, which makes vigilant scouting and management a priority. Regions with heavy continuous corn acres can harbor high CRW populations. However, rotation-resistant beetles and extended diapause beetles contribute to increased populations, even with a rotation in place. With careful monitoring, a timely insecticide application can manage CRW pressure and mitigate damage the following year.

Grain corn ear molds can lead to yield loss at harvest. If mycotoxins are present, grain may be toxic to animals and ultimately unusable. It’s important to understand environmental conditions that lead to diseases and how those diseases affect grain.

Cover crops planted after harvest can improve and maintain soil quality in today’s intensive corn-soybean rotations. Understand how different types of cover crops recover unused nutrients, retain soil moisture, suppress weeds and break up compaction.

Producers who plant insect-traited corn are required to manage refuges to preserve Bt technology. With so many trait options, following refuge management guidelines has become more complicated. SmartStax^® Refuge Advanced^® available in Mycogen^® brand hybrids simplifies achieving higher whole-farm yield potential by making refuge management easier. Refuge Advanced ensures refuge compliance in the Corn Belt¹ with a blend of 95 percent SmartStax seeds and 5 percent non-insect-traited refuge seeds in one bag.

Growers can protect their investment in Roundup Ready^® crops and maximize yield potential through the use of a residual herbicide, such as SureStart^®II or Sonic^®. SureStart delivers consistent, broad-spectrum weed control during early stages of corn growth and offers application flexibility. Sonic provides broad-spectrum foundation control of tough broadleaf weeds to reduce competition for emerging soybeans.

The optimum time to select corn hybrids for the next season is often in the fall, shortly after harvest is complete and your observations from harvest are still fresh in your mind or can be reviewed in your records. Additionally, early ordering often can help ensure availability of hybrids and seed sizes that best fit your farming practices.

Corn rootworm is one of the most damaging pests in the Corn Belt. Don't let corn rootworm rob your yields. Scout for the pest by digging for larvae. Jeff Housman, Mycogen Seeds customer agronomist, walks through how to do root digs to find corn rootworm to evaluate the damage in your fields.

An accurate soil map is important when efficiently managing fields and soil fertility levels. Grid sampling is an effective soil sampling method to use when fields have a high number of soil types or textures, and when previous cropping and management practices have changed or are unknown.

Since the adoption of corn hybrids with biotechnology traits, growers have continued to see more consistent 200-bushel-plus corn crops in past seasons. However, increased yields have created the challenge of dealing with increased levels of residue when planting next year’s crop.

Increased use of reduced tillage and no-till production practices has increased gray leaf spot occurrence. Caused by a fungus, the disease leads to leaf tissue loss, resulting in a decrease in plant sugars and decreased grain production. Potential yield losses range from 5 percent to 40 percent.

Strip-till is a conservation system that uses minimum tillage. It combines the soil-drying and warming benefits of conventional tillage with the soil-protection advantages of no-till by disturbing only the soil that will contain the seed row. Strip-till rows are usually about 8 to 10 inches wide. Because special equipment is required for this type of tillage, understanding what is needed for a strip-till system can help you determine if it’s the right practice for your fields.

Glyphosate-tolerant corn and soybean systems have become commonplace. But more than a decade after the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant crops, weed control has again become a major problem in nearly every crop-producing state. Many weeds have become more difficult to control and herbicide application rates have spiked. Learn to effectively balance your management approach.

Applying a portion of your crop’s nitrogen (N) requirement with irrigation water is a best management practice to reduce nitrate leaching in coarse soils. New irrigation technology systems have made the process of chemigating easier.