An Indiana farm operation’s practices this year will be under the watchful eye of all of agriculture throughout the season. This is the first year for the new Mosaic Pursuit of 300 program featuring 6 farms across the Midwest implementing new practices in their fields to help one day achieve 300 bushel per acre corn yields. The farmers will offer an online journal of what they’re doing in 2013 and how it’s working.
Curt and Chris Hudson are Indiana farmers in Montgomery County participating as Pursuit farmers. Chris tells HAT they are implementing three new economically efficient practices this year.
“The first thing we’re going to be implementing is we’re actually going to be applying MicroEssentials in the spring, pre-plant. And that’s certainly not necessarily something we’re doing because of Mosaic. It’s something that we’re doing through our research since we’ve been involved in this program. It’s a good product but we just haven’t had very much experience or knowledge about it in times past, so we’re actually going to be applying that as our first different practice. Our second practice is that we’re going to further spoon feed our nitrogen to our corn.”
They currently apply nitrogen at planting, in furrow and then come back and sidedress. This year they’ll add to the process tissue samples at R1 and give the field another shot of nitrogen if it needs it.
“And finally we’re going to implement variable rate planting populations. In the past we’ve played with variable rate a little bit but we’ve generally been static populations around 38 to 39 thousand plants per acre.”
The Hudson’s grow 2,600 acres of corn and soybeans in their 100% no till fields. The journal is up and running at the Pursuit website. That’s an important part of the Pursuit idea, trying new practices and sharing the results.
Hear the full HAT interview from Commodity Classic:Chris Hudson