The Biggest Driver of Yields Within Your Control Isn’t What You’re Buying
Every spring, the calls start the same way.
A rep wants to tell you about a product that “adds” bushels. A new biological. A better starter. An improved fungicide program. There is always something promised to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
The industry has spent decades ensuring these calls keep happening, but they’re the wrong conversations.
That’s because you can’t “add” yield. The biggest driver of yield within our control isn’t product. It’s the decision-making behind the products and their placement. It’s management. And it’s precision.
You must identify what’s actually limiting and have the discipline to address that over chasing the latest sales pitches. It seems harder than buying another product. Most people don’t bother.
It’s necessary, though, because more products do not mean more yield. Walk through the average input budget and you’ll find stacked dollars with little logic. You’ll find a little of this because it worked on a neighbor’s field last season, a little of that because of strong marketing this season and some of this because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” Too often, none of it is tied to what’s actually limiting yield.
We see this constantly in plant nutrition.
MYPAS, our plant nutrition analytics system built on over 40 years of high-yield data, doesn’t tell growers what to add. It tells them what’s limiting yield potential. The answers can be surprising. It can be an excess, not a deficiency. That can mean that something the grower has applied heavily for years is now working against them.
In those instances, the prescription isn’t a new product. It’s pulling back. So that’s what our growers do.
None of this is new. It’s not even recent. Carl Sprengel made this discovery and Justus von Liebig popularized it back in the 1800s. Plant growth is determined by the scarcest resource, not the most abundant one. You can pour on nitrogen all season, but if another nutrient is limiting, the nitrogen won’t move the needle. Cue the barrel image.
That principle is at the core of how we think. Every recommendation starts with identifying what is actually holding this crop back. Everything else follows from there.
Most of the industry works in reverse. Here’s the product. Here’s the average response data. Buy it and hope your farm falls within their “win rate.”
Hope is not a strategy. The growers that are consistently raising their APHs year after year aren’t stacking products with the hope of “adding bushels.” They are managing more precisely. They are treating their own seed. They are analyzing their plant nutrition in season with MYPAS. They are adjusting based on their operation’s limiting factors, not universal marketing claims.
So, the next time someone tells you a product “adds” bushels, ask the simple question: what’s limiting my yield right now? Because until you solve for that, no product is likely to deliver the response you’re seeking.