It's corn planting time, and your yield potential is never higher than the day you put the seed in the ground. Perhaps the most important thing you can do to preserve your yield is to PROPERLY PLANT YOUR SEED. If you can place each seed at exactly 2" deep, spaced evenly throughout the field, so every seed emerges at exactly the same time and has an equal opportunity for water and nutrients, that's your goal. While you will never have a "perfect" stand, the closer you can get to perfect, the higher your yield will be.

Last year on our farm, we had a DeTerminator plot, featuring row units from Case I-H, Kinze, John Deere, and White. We graded each row on the following criteria:
Count the total final stand
For each double, subtract 1
For each triple, subtract 2
For each 2 plants 2 leaves behind the others, subtract 1
For each 1 plant 3 leaves behind the others, subtract 1
We used this formula to determine NET EFFECTIVE STAND. In other words, even though we may have PLANTED 30,000 seeds, if there are doubles, triples, or plants behind the others, we may only have 25,000 plants out there that will produce full ears and add to our overall yield.

Think of it this way, anytime you have a double or a plant that lags way behind the others, you've got a WEED! If you have a net effective stand of 25,000, but 29,000 have actually emerged, that means you have 4000 extra weeds in the field!

Ears from plants 2 leaves behind and subsequent ears from both sides. Many of these plants did not have an ear at all!

The most important things we learned from our trial last summer are these:

1) Have a good, level, clean seedbed to start with or have very aggressive coulters in front of your plant to MAKE a good seedbed.

2) Have your row units serviced and calibrated before the season WITH THE CORN SEED SIZE YOU INTEND TO PLANT.

3) Try to plant the same seed size all season. Seed size was WAY more important in our results than planting speed.

4) Even though we've been using and selling Kinze planters for years, the best row unit on our farm's DeTerminator plot last year was the Case I-H. The Kinze mechanical and John Deere tied for 2nd. Kinze's vacuum row unit was next, followed by White. Had I not seen this on my own farm, I probably wouldn't have believed it.

5) NONE of the row units was perfect. It is frustrating to me that in this day and age, we still can't perfectly place every seed in the soil. If you want to improve things on your farm, please follow the first 3 steps listed here, and just as importantly GET OUT OF YOUR TRACTOR AND DIG AROUND while you're planting! To mis-plant a few acres is no big deal. To mis-plant the whole farm could be disastrous.