SWEETWATER, Tenn. – When his milk contract was cut off quickly with Dean Foods in 2018, East Tennessee farmer Josh Watson turned to corn, soybeans and winter wheat to cover his bills. Watson painstakingly ran tests plots for several years to ensure the survivability of those crops.

All that hard work paid big dividends as Watson (who farms along with his son, Jabe, and brother, Caleb) took home first prize in the National Corn Growers Association’s (NCGA) 2025 yield contest with 387 bushels per acres of non-irrigated corn. The win set a Tennessee and national high for the NCGA Non-irrigated category.

“I’ve just always been told that, you know, growing up in East Tennessee, that we couldn’t grow big-bushel corn,” Watson said. “Yield is for the farmers in Illinois, or in West Tennessee where they’ve got the better ground. That’s what I’ve heard most of my life. So, in 2019 I did my own corn plot, and tested different varieties of corn and different populations. A county agent with a weigh wagon measured one of the plots at 312 bushels, which was unheard of for our area. At that point, I knew I wanted to sign up for the contest.

“We’ve been dairy farmers for roughly 70 years,” he said. “In 2018, we opened our mailbox and we received a letter from Dean Foods from Mayfield telling us that in 90 days they’re pulling away from us, so we milked up until the last day and began growing crops.”

The Watson farm in Sweetwater is dotted with small fields between 900 and 1,200 feet in elevation at the base of the Smoky Mountains. Watson said the red limestone soils make a great growing environment, as do the cooler temperatures in the area compared to the rest of the southeast. In addition, the introduction of irrigation, thanks to a 10,000-gallon spring-fed holding pond, helped him reach peak yields across his fields of corn and soybeans.

“Some say you just throw seed in the dirt and you have corn. That’s not farming,” he said. “You’ll go broke if you do that. You gotta be a smart operator and businessman to survive.”

Josh says his 2025 NCGA title is the result of precise agronomic decisions, innovative soil management and persistence in East Tennessee’s challenging climate, proving that high yields are possible even outside the Corn Belt.

Their 55-acre field of Emory silt loam was planted on April 16, 2025, with Dekalb DKC68-35 at a population of 36,000 seeds per acre. The corn followed soybeans in the rotation.

“You have to find the right hybrid for the right soil type,” Watson said. ‘We also planted the field with the rows running north-south, which I think helped us hold moisture, especially in what was a drier year.”

Watson believes a unique organic nitrogen fertilizer product is making a difference on his farm. For the past several seasons, he’s applied spent microbial biomass (SMB), a nutrient-rich coproduct resulting from corn syrup manufacturing, to his fields.

“In the past, we’ve just applied the SMB on top, but on this field, we disked it under, and I really think that made the difference,” he said.

Neither pests nor disease caused headaches for Watson in 2025. Instead, moisture was the biggest obstacle.

“It seemed like the rain kept taking the same path, and this field was in that path,” he said. “I’d say it was a fair season.”

Tillage is part of his secret to success. After buying an oversized tractor specifically for deep tillage, Watson has made it a regular practice, with big benefits in water savings.

“Deep tillage buys me an extra week in dry weather,” he said. “When it turns dry, water is always the biggest factor here. Once it gets hot, withing 10 to 14 days, you can be in a bad situation for water.”

Typically, Watson does inline ripping in the fall and then an additional pass in the spring with a vertical tillage tool.

“It warms the soil up, and we can plant early to get off to a good start and conserve our available daylight,” Watson said.

Finally, every yield contestant has their secret ingredients. For Watson, it’s a corn byproduct that likely originated on his own fields with an application he said benefits the soil microbes.

“We apply a byproduct from of a local corn syrup plant, and we’ve been doing that for the last three years,” he said. “If we incorporate it, we see better results.”

The Watsons earned four state yield contest awards in 2025. Next season, they plan to continue using SMB for fertilizer, but they plan to inject it rather than dribbling it on top or disking it into the soil.

“I like doing the contest to try different things on the plots to see how I can help my production corn the next year,” Jabe said. “There’s a pretty popular song down here that says, ‘Corn won’t grow at all on Rocky Top,’ but our red limestone ground has a lot of growing power. Don’t let the color fool you. We’re always striving to do better.”

Josh Watson’s first national top-three finish came in 2021, when he placed third in this class with a yield of 343.4807 bushels per acre. In 2023, he placed nationally in the Conventional Non-Irrigated category with a yield of 344.9090 bushels per acre. That same year, other members of the Watson family placed first in four different state categories.