By Brian Hefty

Your corn is up and out of the ground. Now what? If you’ve been dreaming about 300 bushel corn or just higher yields and more profits, here are five things you should consider:

  1. Walk your fields every other day. I know this is a lot, and I’m not saying you have to be out there 14 hours a day or anything like that, but the more you look at your crop, especially early in the season, the better decisions you will likely make.
  2. Spray your field borders with Roundup (and a tankmix partner if necessary) when your corn is at V1 or V2. Think about where your biggest weed issues are. Chances are, they are around all your field borders and waterways. If you can get out early to kill those weeds, that will allow you to wait longer to spray the rest of your field. Plus, don’t ever believe people who tell you that waiting until weeds are 2 to 4 inches tall is the best time to spray. The minute that weeds emerge from the ground, or even before then, they are already robbing valuable nutrients and water from your crop. The earlier you control them, the more yield you will have. This “border” spraying is a practice we’ve done for years on our farm. We often shut off the inside half of the boom, so all we’re spraying is half a boom width around our field borders. This doesn’t cost much, but it really helps our yield there. We often throw in some insecticide, too, as that’s typically where stalkborers, cutworms, grasshoppers, and many other insects are the worst.
  3. Automatic boom controls on your sprayer. When you have point rows or even when you come to your headlands, any time you overlap any spray, you are wasting money and potentially damaging your crop. It’s really hard to be perfect when you are manually controlling spray boom sections, but when it is done automatically things are usually more accurate.
  4. RyzUp SmartGrass. We have used this in pastures, wheat, and corn so far. I don’t know that it will always translate to more yield, but you will definitely see more growth IF the weather is cooler when you spray. RyzUp contains gibberellic acid, which is more effective when temperatures are cooler. I prefer to see the weather in the 40 to 65 degree range. This is when grass crops (like corn and wheat) typically grow slower, but RyzUp will speed their growth. If you came to our Field Day a couple years ago, we sprayed RyzUp on all the corn in the field next to the plots. If you remember how much bigger that corn was than anything else, RyzUp was the reason why. The yield gain more than paid for the treatment, but again, timing is the key.
  5. Use a good tankmix partner for Roundup. Status is the best if you have “every” weed. DiFlexx (dicamba plus a corn safener) is a great new option for most broadleaves. The HPPDs (Impact, Armezon, Laudis, and Callisto) are good on most weeds other than wild buckwheat. Buctril is a cheap option if all you have is buckwheat and lambsquarters. If you use atrazine, keep the rate low and remember that atrazine slightly reduces the effectiveness of Roundup.

There are so many things you can do to help your corn yield this year, and as always, we encourage you to try some new things, monitor them closely, and take them to yield to see if you should be using them on the whole farm next year.