Now let’s see what’s popping inside the Pioneer tent. Alex Harrell is in the house and he’s a popular guy, fresh off his record-breaking 218-bushel soybean yield. We caught up with the Leesburg, Ga., strip-tiller for more of his top takeaways from a record-breaking summer.

Alex: “Everybody wants the silver bullet, and we all know that we don’t have that. It’s just a systems approach. We plant early, we try to get into the grain fill during those long days before summer solstice. We do a lot of early season management. We tissue sample. We do a lot of late season management to help increase seed size, paired with having a long grain fill day. I’m a firm believer that a lot of extra bushels come from that.”  

Noah: “Also, as we’ve talked about in the past, these high yield plots, the goal is to learn from them and see what you can apply to more acres correct?”  

Alex: “Correct. We want to see what we learned from those, what worked, what doesn’t work. And we take what does work and apply it to our overall standard production to see if we can raise our overall farm average, which is what really matters.”  

Noah: “Strip-till and cover crops, why has that been a winning combination for you on your farm?”  

Alex: “We use the cover crops for erosion purposes. We have a lot of winter rains. If we don’t get that ground covered, we get a lot of erosion areas in the field. And we strip into those cover crops in the spring.”

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.