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2015 taught farmers to spread their risk

With harvest underway an agronomist says growers are learning what management practices worked and didn’t work with this year’s excessive moisture.

But, Matt Montgomery with Burrus Seed says what worked this year – may not be as successful in more normal weather years.  “There is so much variability that can come at us – that we need to diversify, diversify, diversify – in every area of crop production,” he says.

Montgomery tells Brownfield – in times of tighter margins farmers can’t rely on one management practice to work across all acres.  “We didn’t learn silver bullet answers in 2015,” he says.  “What we learned is that we need to be very diverse in our approach agronomically to our crop so that we spread our risk.  That is the lesson of 2015.”

He says diversification applies to hybrid selection, fertility programs, and disease management.