Project Overview
Information Products
Commodities
- Agronomic: corn
Practices
- Crop Production: seed saving, varieties and cultivars
- Education and Training: farmer to farmer
- Farm Business Management: budgets/cost and returns
- Sustainable Communities: new business opportunities
Summary:
Corn prices are low, input costs are high. We know rotation, cover crops, and reduced tillage can improve this and our environment, but reduced seed costs and seed sales could also improve economic viability in a socially responsible manner. Open pollinated (OP) corn is cheap and great for silage, but rarely for grain due to low yields. We have a good OP (Dairyland) corn variety that deserves improvement for yield. The fastest way to improve corn is hybridization, so we used modern and exotic lines identified from reported genomic and new field-testing to potentially boost the performance of Dairyland. We made and tested topcross hybrids in 2019-2021 from North Dakota to Vermont, and have also formed a new synthetic OP population (by intermating the best of these crosses) in 2022 with the hope to increase yields and seed sale opportunities. We measured grain nutritional quality and other factors to evaluate the economics of on-farm seed production (reviewer suggestion), and have found students from UW-Madison to help with those evaluations in 2023 and 2024. We posted a video online to promote the project, and held a field day in Minnesota in fall of 2022. Information and seeds will be released to the public in 2023 and beyond. We intend to do more public outreach in 2024.
Project objectives:
- Evaluate 30 corn testcrosses and check varieties in university trials and on our farms. (Completed in 2021)
- Hold field events in MN, WI, and MI to discuss sustainable corn and seed production. (Event held in Minnesota in 2022)
- Evaluate changes in knowledge and predicted changes in behavior among attendees. (2 attendees already grow OP corn)
- Evaluate the economics of on-farm seed production with a collaborating students. (Completed in 2023 and 2024)
- Post our methods and findings to the internet and Extension/NGO cooperators. (Started in 2022, more planned for 2023 and 2024)
- Hold a webinar about our methods and findings, evaluate changes among audience as above. (Planned for 2024)
- Increase and release seeds so farmers can grow their own superior topcross hybrids or OP corn varieties. (Started in 2022 and onward)