Spring is here! Hopefully you’ve had a chance to look through the 2020 PFR Book and pick out a PFR Proven™ product or practice to try for 2021. With planting season here, we wanted to share a few early-season PFR Proven products and practices to consider implementing on your farm this spring.

Every year we prepare a plan for the growing season, and every year Mother Nature throws us a curveball! Many of Beck’s Practical Farm Research (PFR)® studies focus on helping you develop your plan for the year utilizing different studies and practices. The PFR Proven™ designation has helped us narrow down the activities that increase profit and set direction.

Diversification. It looks different on every farm, but today it has become a common practice to stay profitable and maintain an operation. For some, it may look like a seed or chemical dealership. For others, it’s growing a niche crop. For one farmer in Iowa, it is investing in an unexpected sector of agriculture for the cool temperatures and saltless waters of the Midwest – shrimp farming.

Each year we launch new and exciting corn products with added yield and additional agronomic strengths. The process to evaluate each class takes years and hundreds, if not thousands, of trials to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each product. It is rigorous; from field observations to data analysis, thousands of hybrids must be narrowed down to a select few that will be launched in our commercial lineup. These are the “best of the best” hybrids from the most elite breeding programs in the world.

One of the first steps to a successful herbicide program is starting clean to allow the pre-emerge herbicide to reach the soil surface. The burndown also allows the opportunity to utilize other “effective” sites of action (SOA) that can’t be used in-season such as Gramoxone® SL 2.0. Spraying early in the spring provides the opportunity to control winter annuals like marestail and emerging summer annuals such as giant ragweed. When evaluating spring burndown options, we must consider if the herbicide has burndown only activity or burndown plus residual activity. Products like Liberty® and Gramoxone SL 2.0 will not have any residual activity but will provide very effective burndown activity. Other burndown products such as Sharpen® or metribuzin will provide residual value depending on the herbicide rate.

Nine years ago, the Stephensons started their farm with 25 acres and a dream. Now, they farm 600 acres of corn and soybeans in the heart of the eastern Corn Belt.

Another season of Practical Farm Research (PFR)® data is in the books. Naturally, the first section I check out is the PFR Proven™ section. This section is very important when it comes to making decisions on your operation. For a product or practice to earn the PFR Proven title, it must be tested at multiple locations for a minimum of three years. In each of the three years, it must provide a positive yield gain each and every year and average a positive ROI over the combined years of research.

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…” Genesis 1:26

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Genesis 1:27

The ever-popular PFR Book that many of you know and utilize on your operation is not the only publication the Practical Farm Research (PFR)® team at Beck’s develops. We also publish a PFR Wheat Book each year!

Charcoal rot is a fairly common disease in dry portions of the U.S. where soybeans are grown. Most years, it's easy to find charcoal rot in areas of Missouri and Kansas; however, the disease is typically challenging to find in geographies further to the east and north.