By Soybean Production Manager Rob Thomas

Open any seed guide and you’ll find agronomic ratings for things like standability, emergence, stalk strength, staygreen potential and Phytophthora root rot. These ratings help us determine which products are best suited for specific environments, management practices and production goals. We use a 1 to 9 scale where 1 is poor, 5 is average and 9 is excellent. In my perfect world, each Champion Seed product would score a 9 on every attribute and yield twice as much as our competition. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. (But our competitors don’t have that luxury either.)

Finding the Champion for every field

Since there are no perfect corn hybrids or soybean varieties, product placement is essential to success. To do this, we need accurate agronomic ratings. The (not-so-secret) secret to our success is that we know finding the Champion for each and every field keeps our growers coming back year after year. And that means matching seed to soil. Fluffing our ratings may get us on a farm, but it won’t keep us there. So how do we get accurate ratings? We observe. We investigate. We listen.

As you know, we have agreements with all the major soybean and corn breeding programs, allowing us to select products to fit our growers’ needs. These genetic suppliers give us initial agronomic scores during the product-selection process. Some ratings like brown stem rot and stem canker are based on genetic markers, but mostly the initial ratings are generated in replicated plots and from what is known about a product’s parentage. After that, it’s in our hands.

We observe

Because they’re in the field throughout the growing season, our sales and agronomy team can verify, adjust and finetune our product ratings. We’re getting firsthand looks at how our products behave on various soil types and environments.

We also have over 60 research locations across our footprint where we can compare the attributes of our products to competitor checks. More important, we can confirm or adjust agronomic ratings of newly selected products, ensuring that our team can match product to field.

We investigate

We don’t have all the answers … and we certainly don’t know what Mother Nature is going to surprise us with from year to year. But, if there is a problem in the field, we want to see it. That’s why we scout fields and investigate any problem areas. They help us tweak our agronomic scores even more.

We listen

Experts usually don’t become experts by talking. They listen. By listening to our growers, dealers, sales team members and production staff, we can improve our product ratings. If someone tells me that Variety X is susceptible to white mold … I’m going to listen, investigate and observe. And if we can confirm it, we will adjust our rating so that we can do a better job placing it in the future.

When you began reading this article you may have been hoping for a more scientific explanation of agronomic ratings. Yes, there is a ton of science behind it all. There’s CRISPR screening, genotyping, marker-assisted selections, gene expression analysis, genetic sequencing, and much more. We don’t do that here. We provide accurate ratings that allow for the best possible product positioning. Our focus is on how our products perform where it matters most — in the field.