I was reading an article from the Corn and Soybean Digest entitled “Yield Contest Winner Provides Last-Minute Corn Growing Tips”. I found one sentence particularly interesting, “Everything has to be managed exactly right,” he says. “Fertility is the key, but I experiment all the time to find out what works best for my area.”

The reason it is interesting is because it is the only sentence in the whole article about fertility. I find it extremely curious that every article about NCGA winners talks about what seed type they use, what seed treatment and/or insecticide is used, and the herbicide and fungicides.

In almost every article about NCGA winners you are lucky to find 2 or 3 sentences about the fertility of the farm.

Since the champion growers are planting the same corn, at the same populations, with the same seed treatments herbicides and fungicides as almost every farmer uses, why doesn’t every one grow 250+ bushel corn?

Proper fertility is hard work, results are hard to measure, and it’s not as exciting as “I applied product x and I grew 20 more bushels of corn!” Why do some genetics result in record yields in some fields and the same genetics in your field falls down? Soil quality and fertility might just have something to do with it.