It got a little repetitive at the Commodity Classic corn banquet announcing the national winners of the Corn Yield Contest when Randy Dowdy of Valdosta, Georgia won six of the 18 categories.
But Dowdy did make history last year with nearly 504 bushels per acre in his irrigated plot using DEKALB DKC 62-08, and he thinks he can do even more than that. “One of the cool things we saw after analyzing SMS yield monitor data, we saw areas in the field that were much higher than that,” he said. “There’s this theoretical promise that there’s 600-800 bushel corn available through genetics, obviously we can’t control weather, but there are a lot of things we can do.”
Dowdy is a first generation farmer and his advice to other corn growers is “learn the science behind it and just push, keep pushing and keep testing things.”
Listen to my interview with Randy here: [wpaudio url=”http://www.zimmcomm.biz/commodity-classic/classic15-ncyc-dowdy.MP3″ text=”Interview with NCYC winner Randy Dowdy”]
2015 Commodity Classic Photo Album
