Farmers across the country will soon take to the fields to plant their 2025 corn crop.
Early projections from industry analysts estimate roughly 92 million acres of corn will go into the ground this year. Assuming those numbers hold true, if we plant an average of 30,000 seeds per acre, that equals approximately 37 million bags of corn.
Naturally, seed shape and size are not going to be equal across all 37 million bags.
How much should we be concerned about this variability, and what steps can we take to get the most out of our yield potential?
Many farmers will plant three to five, or perhaps as many as ten different hybrids on their farms. For comparison, across our research sites and in the Ag PhD Field Day plots, we plant hundreds of hybrids every year, and we sometimes plant 30 to 35 different hybrids in a single day. In fact, the most extreme example is one field near the Ag PhD Field Day site. This year, we will plant about 100 hybrids ranging from 80-day relative maturity all the way to 115-day, and we will accomplish this in about 8 hours. None of those hybrids are selected for seed size similarities.