Enhancing Corn Yield with Elevated Plant Population.

Corn producers in MS struggle to remain profitable with depressed commodity prices and high input costs. They need information to get the most out of every dollar spent to produce a profitable corn crop. Farmers could improve profitability by implementing an early planting date, optimizing fertility, plant configuration in the field, population per unit area, and irrigation. Based on prior work at Arkansas, we hypothesized that one of the best ways to improve yields was to increase population. Treatments in this experiment included (3) different hybrids of varying maturity and (2) populations: 35,000 and 70,000 replicated throughout the field in 13 x 30’ plots. The corn was planted in slight excess of these target populations and thinned by hand to exactly 35K & 70K populations. Our highest yielding treatment was a (70K Plants Per Acre) Dekalb DKC 67-72 hybrid at 307 bu/A. We planted 23-March and only furrow irrigated twice. The same hybrid at 35K yielded 270 bu/A which was more economically favorable given present commodity prices and seed cost. Based upon these data, we suspect that the optimal population, if fertility and water are not limiting, should be around 45-50K plants per acre. Future studies will be discussed.