by Jake Young, Regional Agronomist, Novus Ag

Selecting the right seed varieties to plant on your farm is one of the most crucial crop management decisions to be made. While we all worry about selecting for high yield potential, there are several considerations to be made when evaluating your seed options.

Local Yield Performance and Consistency

A plot winner from a single yield trial may not always translate to great performance on your farm. Soil type, growing conditions, fertility, and management will all influence hybrid/variety performance, and this should be considered when evaluating yield trial results.

It’s best to evaluate multi-year and multi-location yield trial data to ensure that a hybrid/variety’s performance is consistent for your area. Universities, ag retailers, and seed companies routinely conduct yield trials that include several varieties and hybrids. Links to this information is provided below:

• Iowa State University
• University of Arkansas
• University of Illinois
• Kansas State University
• University of Missouri
• University of Nebraska
• Ohio State University

Interpreting Yield Trial Results

Predicting the best variety or hybrid to place on your farm is difficult, since yield is highly affected by the environment and year. To help control for this variability, yield trials often use multiple replications, years, and locations to ensure that most of the ‘noise’ or variability is accounted for.

When evaluating yield trial results, don’t rely on the yield value alone, as it’s important to look for the LSD, or least significant difference of the data set.

This is a statistical tool to determine whether a yield value is significantly different than another. If a yield difference between two hybrids/varieties is greater than the LSD, they are considered significantly different. Differences in yield less than the LSD are not significantly different and may be due to random variability or chance.