By Pamela Smith
If green jackets were awarded for raising corn, David Hula could fill a closet. He holds more National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) Yield Contest titles than Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have combined Masters Tournaments wins.
This year the Charles City, Virginia, farmer came to the top of the corn yield leader board with 623.8439 bushels per acre (bpa) in the irrigated strip-till category to set another new record for the national contest. It was enough to best the previous record of 615.1953 bpa, which was also set by Hula in 2019. It secured his 12th national high yield win in the contest and his fifth world corn yield record. He is the only farmer to exceed the 600 bpa mark in the contest and has done it three times (2019, 2021, 2023).
Sponsored annually by the National Corn Growers Association for the past 59 years, the contest produced 27 national winners in nine production classes this year from 15 different states. Those national winning entries averaged 373.27 bpa. Overall, NCGA announced the contest generated a total of 6,883 completed entries from 46 states with verified yields averaging 269 bushel per acre, well beyond the latest projected U.S. yield average of 174.9 bpa.
Following with the second-highest yield in the 2023 contest was Hula's son, Craig Hula, with a 590.0198 bpa entry in the no-till irrigated contest category. The highest non-irrigated entry this year was 425.8619 bpa, a conventional entry grown by Kevin Kalb from Dubois, Indiana.
A new nitrogen management category limited to 100 growers in nine Corn Belt states was launched this year. Nick Preissler, Aurora, Nebraska, took top honors with an entry of 312.9688 bpa grown with 180 lbs. or less of actual nitrogen applied.
CORN IS LIFE
Hula doesn't chase golf balls and only occasionally hunts for recreation. "My hobby is corn. The only thing I don't enjoy is harvesting a bad crop," Hula told DTN.
"I like to walk cornfields. I appreciate talking to other growers about corn. It's not a job when it is something you enjoy this much," he said.
His Renwood Farms operation is located 10 miles upriver from the Jamestown Settlement, the first permanent English settlement in North America. The same soil has seen 400 years of agriculture, but it is how that soil grows corn today that holds Hula's interest.
"The neat thing that we are able to do is our systems approach to producing corn," Hula said. "Clearly, the fields that have reached higher yields are a little different than the rest of the production ground, but we've been able to achieve high yields over the years on five different locations with five different pivots and in two different counties. It's not like we have one spot that we've doctored up," he said.
Hula, like most farmers, knows where the good spots in the field are located, but through 1-acre grids he has information as to why they are better. In fact, the 234-acre field that grew the record-breaking 623.8439 bpa would likely be considered highly inconsistent by many.
"That field is unique. It has a 160-acre pivot, and at least half of the field was dug up for sand and gravel and reclaimed. The other half of the field is virgin dirt with all kinds of different soil types," he said.
"Man can't put dirt back together as well as originally made by God," Hula said, pointing out that the non-irrigated portion of the reclaimed portion of the field also sustained some wildlife damage and yielded below 113 bpa this season. The irrigated portion of the field averaged 360 bpa. The entire field (irrigated and non-irrigated) averaged 294 bpa. Overall, the plot containing the winning hybrid averaged 577 bpa and had the highest kernel density of any he's ever harvested at 66.1 lbs.
Hula's entry was Pioneer P14830VYHR, a 114-day hybrid that was new to him this year and commercially available on a limited scale in 2023. He planted 12 acres of the hybrid on the recommendation of seed agronomists and other trusted advisors, who had seen it in yield trials.
Hula calls the number a "zip-code hybrid" -- a nod to the five-digit classification. "We tend to hang on to numbers here at Renwood Farms longer than most. We are slow to adopt new hybrids in high-yielding environments," he said. "But this new freshman class of genetics is outperforming the previous classes, and we do like what we are seeing."
P14830VYHR is classified as a HTF (high total fermentable) hybrid for the dry grind ethanol market and contains the technology known as Optimum AcreMax Leptra, which pyramids above-ground traits with LibertyLink and Roundup Ready herbicide tolerances. Hula said the Viptera portion of that stack was particularly important due to the high level of corn earworm pressure the area faces.
The 2023 production year was not without challenges for the corn yield winner. Total rainfall from April through September was 16.8 inches compared to an average year of 23.7 inches. Using soil moisture probes as indicators, he delivered 9.6 inches per acre of irrigation water to the winning crop.
CHECKING BOXES
While often asked for his secret sauce to achieve bumper yields, Hula prefers to talk about "checking boxes."
"We are great observers," he said. "I'm constantly walking these fields and watching for potential. We have to be ROI (return on investment) minded. It makes no sense to throw money at a crop if the potential doesn't exist," he said.
The first box is checked by flagging the corn as it spikes. Stragglers are not welcome. "With this hybrid we saw tremendous uniform emergence," Hula recalled. Harvest population stood at 48,700 plants per acre. He planted May 5 in 30-inch rows.
"We had two good planting windows this year, and this yield came out of the first one," he said. One thing he watched closely was the influence of smoke from Canadian wildfires. "We dealt with smoke late spring and early summer," Hula recalled. "But we escaped the window when the plant was setting the growth of the ear."
Tissue sampling is the next box. "Around 350 to 425 GDU (growing degree days) a tissue sample tells us whether this is a crop that can be pushed or if it is just regular irrigated corn," he said. He looks at many parameters to make that assessment.
And a lot of those clues have been learned by listening to what other farmers experiences, he said. Hula, along with another previous corn yield contest winner, Randy Dowdy, have put together a program called Total Acre that coaches other growers in the ways of producing high-yield crops in a sustainable way.
"There are certain times a grower can influence his crop," Hula said. "When we open a bag of seed corn, the yield potential is as big as it is going to be. We just keep asking questions from there on -- looking at tissue tests and moisture probes and weather forecasts to see if this crop is one worth continuing to push. This one was," he said.
One clue that this might be a winner was the number of tillers Hula found while walking those rows of P14830 early in the season. Corn breeders mostly design plants so one stalk makes one ear of corn. Corn plants with only one ear can only produce so much yield, he noted.
"We strive for 10 bushels per 1,000 seeds planted. If we plant 32,000, we hope to be in the 300 bpa range. In some areas, we're planting 26,000 to hit 250 bpa and we don't always achieve that," he said.
"But I've seen some 500- to 520-bpa corn where we've gotten 11 to 12 bushel per 1,000, and we clearly passed that this year. Several years ago, we were able to identify tillers and keep them long enough to put on an ear," he added. "That's what we did this year."
Hula said the ear resulting from the tiller wasn't as large as the primary ear, but it added supplemental bushels. "If a grower is going to turn that supplemental ear into a crop, he's got to have information that the plant is set to feed additional ear production.
"If one sees that ear later in the season and hasn't primed that crop, it is never going to turn into bushels. That's why we keep looking at the crop. We have a history of yields that have been higher and understand when it is a crop worth pushing," he added.
The winning entry received a total of 575 lbs. of nitrogen, 156 lbs. of phosphorus, 480 lbs. of potassium, 12 lbs. of boron and 80 lbs. of sulfur per acre. "Yes, that nitrogen total sounds high if you consider most farmers are applying in the 200- to 250-lbs.-per-acre range. But we are also feeding a crop that is more than twice as big as the rest of the country. To yield higher than normal, you must fertilize for it," Hula said.
"That's another reason we check boxes and keep evaluating whether we continue. It would not make sense to put 575 lbs. of nitrogen on a crop that is only going to make 300-bushel corn," he said.
It's also why that winning crop had at least a dozen fertilizer applications throughout the season -- from nitrogen placed on the seed to in-season applications. "At some point in time, if things go south, we stop spending money," Hula said.
A LOT OF CORN
Hula isn't sure how high the theoretical threshold for corn yield might be, but he's pretty sure it hasn't been breached. And he sees a new era coming as biologicals and other specialty products stimulate biology and meet the nutritional requirements of the crop in more sustainable ways.
"I'm excited about where agriculture is headed, if we get good information, and it continues to help us become more efficient. I believe we will start to see commercial fertilizer and other nutrients reduced. We are still going to be spending money on production, but our yields will continue to rise," he said.
Stewardship is key for Hula since the farm lies in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, the largest estuary in the U.S. Irrigation is pulled as surface water from the James River. Working with James River Equipment, their John Deere dealer, the farm is utilizing probes to analyze and squeeze more from each drop by only applying what moisture needed.
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