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Breaking 116 bushels/acre

In 2015, Florian Hagmann won the DuPont Pioneer 2015 Yield Challenge Contest with his 116.8 bushel per acre crop. Hagmann won it for the third time in four years with a harvested plot of 1.26 acres in a 147-acre field near Birch Hills, Sask. A minimum 0.9-acre plot is required in the contest. The entire field averaged 111 bushels per acre.

By comparison, the Guinness World Record for oilseed rape is 6.7 tonne per ha (119 bu/ac), which was set by Lincolnshire Wolds grower Tim Lamyman in Britain in August 2015. It beat the previous record set in January 2015 by Chris Dennison from Oamaru, New Zealand, by 0.5 t/ha.

The chart shows the winning formulas. A common thread is intensive management of nutrients throughout the growing season. Interestingly, Hagmann pulled his high yield off in a growing season of three and one-half months compared to 10 months in New Zealand and almost a year in Britain.

April 7, 2016  By Bruce Barker