Winter is a good time to reflect on the previous season in order to prepare for the upcoming one. The Marysville, Ohio, Grow More Experience site improved an understanding of how various Syngenta products can help growers in the area improve their crops’ productivity.
The Grow More Experience isn’t just another field day, as it offers season-long opportunities for growers and retailers to see visual effects of test plots and relate those outcomes to their individual farms.
“We prefer that area farmers stop by to visit these sites more than one time a year,” said Derrick LeBeau, a Syngenta agronomic service representative in Ohio. “We always try to make sure that something is visually showing so that growers and retailers can get a good look and get a feel of what may be going on in their fields in early season, mid-season, late season or even at harvest time.”
In 2015, Ohio farms saw a wide array of yield results from well below average to the north and northwest to above average to the south. LeBeau says that the Marysville area ended the year with what would be considered an average year. The one constant throughout the state, which was also noticed at the Grow More Experience corn plots, was disease pressure.
“We had anything from gray leaf spot to northern corn leaf blight show up and that gave us an opportunity to emphasize the importance of scouting fields,” LeBeau said. “We already had set dates and growth stages in our protocol of when we were going to spray our corn. That allowed us to show our guests that at different timings the plant will go through different stress environments.”
Producers that visited the Grow More Experience were able to see the differences of applying fungicide to the crop in the early stages and going back during the reproductive stages of the season and help with grain fill, test weight and moisture and protect the yield that’s there.
Testing at the Marysville location also looked at pest pressures and the performance of Syngenta’s Agrisure Viptera trait, which control 16 above and below ground insects.
“That site was affected by corn earworm and fall armyworm and Agrisure Viptera performed very well,” LeBeau said. “We also had some non-traited corn in plots, which had significant damage to the ears and those ears lost one-third to a half of their full potential due to insect feeding.”
“The competitor traits on site that did stack up and offered some protection, but when we stepped back and looked at the big picture, the Viptera trait had the least amount of visual effect of damage to the actual ear and to the ear tip.”
Visit KnowMoreGrowMore.com to find out more about the 2015 results from the Grow More Experience site in Marysville and to find out about 2016’s research and schedule of events.