Hey guys, Evan here with EZ Custom Ag again. We’re out in the field, had a few questions on how to do yield checks on corn. So, going to give a quick explanation today and be sure to check out the calculator in the description of this video. It gives you an Excel document that’s really easy to do this on your own.
So, we’re looking at some AgriGold corn here planted in 30 inch rows. So, the first thing we have to do is measure off one one -thousandth of an acre. Depending on your row width, if you’re in, you know, down to 12s, up to 36s, the distance you’re going to have to measure off is going to be different. But our example today is going to be in 30 inch rows, which I assume most of you guys are in.
It’s going to be 17 feet 4 inches. What we’re going to do is we’re going to measure that off, count each ear in one row, all the way down from one end to the other. So, if you’re planting 34 ,000, you’re hoping to get 33 or 34. So, here we plant 36 ,000. We ended up with a 35 count in the 17 feet that we measured off here.
So, in the calculator, you’ll just type in whatever number you come up with, whether it be 28, 34, 37, into the first box. The next thing we’ll do is we’ll pick a couple average ears, maybe three or four from your sample, and we’ll go ahead and count the length and also the girth, so the rows around. Then we’ll put those numbers into the calculator, an average of the three ears, and it will multiply those together to get you the number of kernels per ear, multiplied by how many ears you should have per acre based on your thousandth of an acre count, gives you kernels per acre. Now, if you go down lower in the calculator, you’ll see where it goes from 70,000 to 100 ,000. What that is, is kernels per 56 pounds. So, kernels per bushel. The heavier your kernels, the less kernels you’re going to have per bushel. So the closer we can get to that 60, 70 number, the higher our yield is going to be.
So, you’ll see a range of yields there, depending on the weight of your kernels, and that’ll kind of give you a range of where your yield may fall for that field. I like to do this in three or four spots for a field, take some high ground, some low ground, some medium ground, just kind of get a feel for what we’re looking at across the field. But, we always remember that the four components to yield are population, kernels long, kernels around, and then kernel weight. So, when we add all those together, that gives us our yield in the end. And that’s what we sell to the elevator. So, we’ve got to look at all those components together and see where we end up. I’ve had some 35 by 14 corn that can out yield some 16 by 45 just based on kernel weight and kernel depth.
So, as we go in later in the season, we’re mid -September here, it’s very important to remember that the year’s not over until these ears are black -layered. We’ve got to get as much grain weight as we can at each kernel, and you’ll really see how that plays out when we look at the bottom of the calculator with the kernel weight variable in there.
So, thanks a lot for watching guys, and be sure to click on the link below in this video. We’ll see you next time out in the field.