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| Ron..NE ILL..10/48 - 1/10/2026 06:16 Can I ask, what is your max/minimum planting rate for corn?
IF (!!!) you had to lock in a fixed planting rate, what would you use?
Do you ever use just a fixed rate plot just to prove that the vari-rate yields are better/comparable?
Just asking. Thanks
If you have fairly consistent ground and you're happy planting 32-34k on all of it, VRT planting will probably never pay if you have to spend any money to make it happen.
If you have some really variable ground it can pay very very well. We have lots of variability on our ground but the most dramatic field of ours (concerning variability of soil types) varies from 16k seeds/acre to 32k seeds/acre with several steps in between, in the same pass across the field.
Prior to doing VRT we used to split the difference and plant 24k on the whole field. We were giving up top end yield on the better soil types and still burning up/wasting seed $'s on the poorer soil types. Now we plant the same amount of seed on the field, just put it where it can grow/produce to its potential.
It would be almost impossible to do an actual comparison of straight rate vs VRT just because the field is so variable that a side by side test is almost worthless. That said, if you go back to when we made the switch from straight rate 24k to doing VRT, I'm pretty confident that we bumped that particular field up ~20 bpa by doing VRT. The better soils produce more and the poorer soils produce something more consistently.
On beans we've used VRT to lower populations in areas where we've had standability and white mold problems. It hasn't eliminated white mold problems entirely but we haven't seen the disaster areas (where the yield is cut in half) that we had seen in the past.
As for what we use for writing our prescriptions, its based off of yield maps and decades of farming the same land. On the yield maps I tend to ignore years that I consider outliers, years that get 2x normal precipitation and years that it just never rains. You can't base your populations off of extreme weather, you want to play the odds and whatever your "normal" weather pattern is is what you're most likely to get.
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VRT seed recs
