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Beck’s agronomist discusses planning for 2020

A field agronomist with Beck’s says there are several things to keep in mind when preparing for the 2020 season.

Travis Burnett says Midwestern farmers should consider some agronomic practices from Beck’s Practical Farm Research (PFR) program.

“Planting date would be one, the use of fungicides in both corn and soybeans is really big, narrow row widths of soybeans is one of those, and split applications of nitrogen,” he says.

Beck’s started the PFR program to provide research to help farmers make decisions to improve profitability. If a practice is designated as PFR Proven, it means that it has provided a positive yield increase during three or more years of testing. 

Burnett says farmers shouldn’t make too many changes on their operation solely based on last year.  

“We hope that 2019 was an anomaly and is not something that’s going to be the more norm,” he says. “But we do know that the weather patterns are more extreme. We’re getting a lot more rainfall here than we did 50 years ago so that’s something we have to take into account, and we need to find ways to be more efficient on the farm.”

Brownfield interviewed Burnett during an annual PFR Insight meeting.