Some of the high yielding innovators in the 2010 Illinois Soybean Yield Challenge were at the 2011 Farm Progress Show to talk about the program and what they learned.

The Shipman Elevator Team, sponsored by BASF, took first place in District 6 last year and also won the Novel Practices Award in the challenge funded by the Illinois soybean checkoff. Team member Dwayne Milner, pictured here with his BASF rep Kaleb Hellwig, says they are competing again this year to build on what they learned last season. “As a whole, we learned that we’ve got to manage soybeans, we’ve got to plant them early and we’ve got to manage more like corn,” Dwayne told me.

Teams of growers, working together in nine districts across Illinois, farm side-by-side plots using traditional techniques on one and innovative methods on the other. The common goals for all Challenge participants are to maximize soybean yields while producing valuable data that will benefit researchers and growers alike. The Shipman team averaged 85.3 bu/ac of the top five growers, which was the highest of all the district averages last year. “Everybody did a lot of different approaches, but our most common were seed treatments, planting early, fertility management, used Headline as our fungicide, used an insecticide on it and residual herbicides,” Dwayne says.

Listen to or download my interview with Dwayne here. Dwayne Milner Interview

2011 Farm Progress Show Photo Album