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 successful harvest depends not only on crop conditions but also on properly functioning equipment. While you can’t eliminate all harvest losses, you can identify the source and adjust harvest equipment for optimum performance.

Fertilizer programs should begin with accurate soil testing. Growers who can self-sample reduce costs and better understand their soil situations. Review best practices so your samples lead to more reliable results and more educated management decisions.

Contrary to some studies, dry matter losses after blacklayer are not overwhelming. Still, growers should carefully manage their corn harvest timing to minimize loss altogether.

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.

Factors that stress corn throughout the growing season can lead to stalk rots, which can lead to yield loss due to premature plant death or lodging. Understanding stalk rots risk factors and management practices are critical.

Corn growers often mistakenly correlate test weight (TW) to yield. Understand why the two measures are only marginally related.

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.

Harvesting corn for silage leaves little plant residue on the ground to help control water runoff and soil erosion. A cover crop either interseeded before or planted immediately after silage harvest will help protect the soil from wind and heavy rains. An established cover crop also helps improve soil structure and uptake of nutrients.

It can be difficult to schedule irrigation, herbicide application and harvest if you don’t have a good handle on corn maturity. Identifying the milkline and blacklayer will help gauge the stage of corn growth and estimate physiological maturity.

Wet and/or humid conditions can lead to black, sooty molds in cornfields at harvest. Sooty molds are species of secondary saprophytic fungi — microorganisms that feed on dead plant material. The presence of these molds can create excessive amounts of black dust when harvesting affected cornfields.

Dry summers and relentless pests increase your corn crop’s susceptibility to aflatoxins, which are harmful to livestock. Reduce your exposure with effective management.

Early frost at harvest can lead to high or uneven moisture, low test weights and increased foreign material. Careful planning and management of drying and storage can help maintain yield.

Many factors contribute to how early frost in the fall will affect corn harvest and the expenses associated with drying and storage. Damage severity will depend on the stage of the crop, the duration of freezing temperatures and subsequent plant damage.

Heavy wind and rain late in the growing season can dramatically affect corn. Flooding, downed plants and disease are just a few of the potential management challenges related to extreme weather. Consider your options for recovering as much value as possible and take precautions when storing and feeding damaged corn.

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.

Several methods provide growers with a reasonable estimate of corn hybrids’ relative maturity, but differences among rating systems sometimes confuse growers. Are you familiar with each method?

Poor nitrogen (N) application methods or application timing could result in a shortage of available N to meet your corn crop’s needs next season. Understanding proper N application methods can help maximize N efficiency on your operation.

Fair weather along with an early harvest provides conditions conducive for growers to fall-apply manure to their fields. Before applying manure, review your nutrient management plan to determine the appropriate amounts of nutrients needed to improve success in selected fields.

Difficult-to-control and herbicide-resistant weeds are major issues facing crop farmers. Troublesome weeds sometimes get a head start by popping up in the fall. Although tillage can take care of problem weeds, it isn’t always preferred or even possible. A well-timed fall herbicide application can prevent weeds from getting a head start and save time during the busy spring season.