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WCIN | Recently, (the past two months) I have heard from 4 different sources that higher grain quality corn hybrids benefit more from late season nitrogen applications. It makes sense to me. More yield from grain fill and not kernel counts. I guess I have several questions really. 1.) How late is late enough? I have a Deere 4700 sprayer. I could dribble 28% on at V8. Doubt I could go much beyond that with that machine. But I have never done much dribbling on (except for this year when we had a neighbor with Y-drops do test strips for us) but from what I know it very weather sensitive. You'd need rain soon after dribbling. It seems like a daunting task to side dress 800+ acres of corn in a timely manner and weather sensitive all at the same time. 2.) How much N is enough? We side dressed 50 lbs of 28% this year in our strips. We had 2 of 4 hybrids respond enough to pay the way. The other two had little to no response. These were 1/2 to 3/4 mile 16 row strips replicated in 2 fields over 40 acres. The 2 hybrids that responded were good grain quality hybrids and not what I would call race horsey.
I am not wanting to start a brand war at all, but these four sources all said the same thing. That Pioneer Hybrids responded to the late season application more than DeKalb or Agrigold. These were agronomically minded people that worked for various companies. We grow hybrids from all 3 of those companies. I have had mixed results with all three. One year one company excels and the next year its somebody else. More often than not, its parity. What I have never analyzed was the correlation between ranking for that year and the N efficiency for the year. We always preplant 170 NH3 with n-serve OR side dress 170. A few times I have split applied 85 and 85. Never have noticed a difference in yield. Now I'm wondering if I could potentially notice a savings or return on different hybrids based off of the timing, placement or amount of N? I realize that some hybrids use N more or less efficiently that others. Not my first rodeo. But I'd like to be able to narrow it down without trial and error. I know that dekalb and agrigold have it in their literature but I have never put a lot of faith in those. Only because their other ratings seem so blah. Long post but just thinking... | |
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Late season N application sucess by hybrid brand??
