Expectations

Bryan Lutter (DSM, Region 1 – South Dakota)

“Oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises.” – William Shakespeare

My modern translation (whether right or not) is “Expectation is the root of all heartache.”

In Western South Dakota, we adhere to those words and keep our expectations for a big crop in check. Every rain is considered a “bonus” that we didn’t count on. This year we didn’t get many of those “bonuses”. The 2012 growing season left us all baffled at how the grass/hay/alfalfa could be so burnt up already in May while the corn stayed green all summer. What we saw with our own eyes ran counter to intuition. It was nothing short of miraculous.

Not to brag, but yields of 60 bushel/acre on corn was quite common in my district. Where it came from, we will ponder all winter.  Planting date made a huge difference, with the later planted corn lucking out by pollinating during the Sturgis Rally, when the nights got long and cool compared to those Mid-July cookers.

5622/23/24 lived up to its drought-tolerance hype and I literally shed a tear of respect as I type those numerals into this keypad. I feel incredibly fortunate to have this old War-Horse in our line-up, as it made a salesman out of this cowboy. Some of our experimental products in our research plots, as well as a couple new commercial numbers, also really hauled-the-mail under drought conditions.

This coming Friday October 26 I’m scheduled to harvest another research plot in Shannon County on the Pine Ridge Reservation. After last week’s driving winds sand-blasted the landscape, we will learn what products still hung onto their ears in a true dryland environment. Here at Producers Hybrids, we take dryland product research past the outer-fringes of sanity. The way I see it, if our testing doesn’t push a lot of the hybrids straight off the cliff, then we just aren’t trying hard enough.

I look forward to the whirlwind of writing orders and taking early payments that will fill the next several weeks!