In the meantime,
A wise farmer and former Pioneer
sales rep in this area is often quoted as saying that you need to grow hybrids
adapted for this area. He was not in
favour of planting full season hybrids. Too
much risk with wet corn and early killing frost was his rationale. We would agree with this, however the maturity
bar has moved since the time this statement was made.
The 30 year average heat unit
accumulation at London airport is 3215 heat units. If you assume there is 200 less heat units in
South Perth, our average maturity selections should focus around the 3000 heat
mark . This means our adapted maturity
bracket is now 29-3100 heat units. Back
in the time of our wise former Pioneer sales rep 3000 heat unit was considered
full season. Anything above 3000 was just plain insanity. This is no longer true.
Times have changed.
To illustrate this we looked at
our own plot that had two maturity groups side by side. There were 5 hybrids that ranged from
2850-3000 heat units and 5 hybrids that ranged from 3000 to 3150 heat units.
|
|
Yield
|
Moisture
|
Drying
|
|
“Late Group”
|
201
|
30.0
|
$.59
|
|
“Early Group”
|
192
|
27.1
|
$.53
|
|
Difference
|
+9
|
-2.9
|
$.06
|
The full season group produced
$34.20 (9 bus x $3.80) more income minus drying cost of $12.00 for a net of
$22.20 per acre.
We recognize that 30% corn is too
high for some drying systems to handle efficiently. A lot of 3100 HU corn does not make sense in
this case. There are a number of good hybrids with good drydown characteristics that
make 29-3000 heat unit selections appropriate for these systems. Times have indeed changed.
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