Jeff Meis, program coordinator for the Iowa contest, understands the concerns about yield contests. But we believe they have value because they show farmers the yield potential of today's hybrids. The Iowa Master Corn Growers' Contest crowned its first champion in 1938. His winning yield was 135.18 bushels per acre. Yield contests help to show what's possible.
Farmers enter yield contests to see how much corn they can grow.
Despite protests, you'd be hard-pressed to find a lot of support for discontinuing the yield competition. Ken Ziegler is not one who necessarily criticizes Childs or the premise of the NCGA contest. But he does look at the contest from a different perspective. Ziegler is the Iowa State University coordinator of the Iowa Crop Performance Test, an annual chronicling of corn yields from hundreds of hybrids, with a history going back to the 1919 growing season. Plots in the Iowa Crop Performance Test attempt to mirror standard production practices, Ziegler says.