CARY, Ill. — With corn and soybean harvest underway, Farmers Independent Research of Seed Technologies (FIRST) is beginning to produce data and reports of this year’s variety tests.
According to FIRST General Manager Joe Bruce, 18 percent of the company’s test sites have been harvested and reports are beginning to show up on its website. Progress of the harvest depends on geography; it’s well underway in Virginia, central and northern Illinois, northern Iowa and South Dakota as of last Friday. It’s starting in Minnesota, North Dakota, Delaware, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska. It has yet to start in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
There are no tests this year in Michigan, after a long-time employee left in April.
Next week, Farm World will begin printing weekly articles based on these reports, out of Indiana, Illinois and Ohio. The company does testing in 16 states altogether. It tests corn and soybeans in all these states, except for soybeans in Virginia and Michigan. It also tests corn silage in 28 counties in Pennsylvania.
FIRST Field Manager Jason Beyers is responsible for 108 test plots, located in northern Illinois, northeastern Missouri and southern Wisconsin. As of Friday he’d completed the harvest at five out of six corn plots in Illinois. Plots are about seven acres each.
He had also harvested about 50 percent of soybeans for the tests there. He described the soybean yield as "pretty typical" and said the planting season had been ideal for the most part. "We tend to pick higher ground for tests, but in the typical farmer’s fields there’s 5 to 7 percent of the fields with water damage," Beyers said.
Many companies as well as universities do this kind of testing, Bruce said. FIRST’s selling point is its speed as well as quality. Although universities may make testing reports available to the public free of charge, they do charge seed companies a fee and can take up to two months to produce reports after the data from the harvest come in, he said.
However, FIRST can and does produce reports 24-48 hours of the day data is submitted. "Quality is important. Speed is our whole business," Bruce added.
Perhaps not surprisingly, weather is having a big impact on the harvest this year. The Dakotas, Minnesota, northern Iowa and northern Illinois all had good rainfall and excellent conditions, and this is reflected in the yields, he said. Southern Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, southern Nebraska, southern Illinois, Indiana and most of Ohio have had lots of rain – and that’s been a problem for testing.
"The problem we’re having is data quality because of excess rain," Bruce said. "We’re going to end up rejecting tests. If we say yields are inconsistent, it could depend on whether the plot was high ground or low ground."
He added in some instances a report will be published but then labeled "rejected" because yield differences are too great; he suspects many tests from those areas will end up that way. It’s a judgment call whether to reject data, and "you don’t want to throw out good information, either."
The other challenge facing the company this year, and maybe beyond, is availability of labor. While there are many FIRST could and would train to conduct tests – recent college graduates, farmers who need more income with or without college education, or others with an interest in or aptitude for research or farming – a person has to be able to finance a tractor, Bruce said.
The company operates on a contractor basis. As such, someone working at the company is really starting his or her own business, not just becoming an employee.
The situation in Ohio is also somewhat tentative, Bruce said. Testing there is being done by a large company for FIRST on a temporary basis, and that is not ideal.
"Whenever we contract with a third party, we lose control over some things. Test results are less timely with a large company. We’re fast and we charge for that. We put a lot of effort into being timely," he explained.
