Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association (OSCIA) bus tour attendees quizzed a company representative about strategies to increase the yield on Bayer CropScience’s still-in-development short-stature corn once it’s released commercially in Canada.
But the company insists it won’t be made available until top-level yields are essentially bred into the hybrid.
“We’re being very cautious about how and when we release (Preceon in Canada),” customer solutions lead Jessica Wettlaufer said during OSCIA’s Summer Farm Day and Tour on Aug. 15. “Any new trait is awesome, but it’s really important that there’s a business case for the farmers.”
For a tour stop at the University of Guelph-managed Ontario Crops Research Centre at Centralia, Wettlaufer brought one stalk each of Preceon and a standard Dekalb hybrid planted on the same day at Bayer’s Tavistock test plot farm.
The short stature of the corn is similar to the considerably smaller height of the plant’s pre-colonization ancestors in Mexico.
She explained, in a subsequent interview with Farmtario, that it was developed by turning off the biological message received by the germinating and growing plant to compete as much as possible with its neighbours for sunlight.
Availability timeline
Currently in the United States — where Preceon has been available commercially on a phased-in basis since 2023 and is now grown on approximately 100,000 acres — Bayer is marketing a hybrid with an inserted gene.
So far there’s no official timeline for the product line’s commercial release in Canada. When it does happen, Wettlaufer said the hybrids sold here will instead have a naturally occurring trait that’s still being developed by the company’s plant breeders.
This is the third year for a test plot of the inserted-gene hybrid in Tavistock. Wettlaufer told tour participants that Preceon begins to differentiate itself from its standard counterparts between the V-8 and V-10 growth stage. The plants clipped for the Aug. 15 event stood at about seven feet tall for the Preceon and over 10 feet tall for the standard hybrid.
Cob location was slightly closer to the ground on the Preceon stalk.
Increased weather resilience
Bayer’s website message is that short-stature corn offers greater resilience to extreme weather events because it’s less likely to be damaged by storms. But Wettlaufer’s message to the farmers on the OSCIA tour was a little different: because it takes longer to grow to a greater height, it will allow passage by tractor-driven sprayers. Preceon therefore offers greater flexibility and greater cost-effectiveness for both nutrient and fungicide application.
“We can feed better and we can spray better,” she said. “We can put toolbars through the fields for a lot longer and we can do it with our own ground rig” instead of hiring in other, more costly methods of spraying.
Responding to a question from an OSCIA attendee, Wettlaufer stressed that purchasing the company’s FieldView digital platform won’t be a requirement to grow Preceon in Canada.
Most of the questions, however, revolved around the potential for increasing plant population when there’s less biomass per plant for the combine to tackle. Wettlaufer responded that, both through decreased row spacing and increased plant population per row, U.S. growers are finding ways to consistently boost yields in the short-stature corn.
Marketing “smart corn”
Wettlaufer said the company’s strategy for introducing Preceon in Canada won’t be limited, however, to promoting the benefits of growing short-stature corn.
The trademarked “smart corn” approach alongside the crop protection and FieldView suites will be marketed hand in hand with the new hybrids.
“It’s not going to be ‘we have a new corn hybrid and it’s short’. It’s going to be more like ‘we have a new corn hybrid that’s short, and here’s how we’re going to combine it with some other new technologies to help you increase your yield potential beyond what you’re seeing now.’”
Already, she added, interest is building among Ontario cash croppers.
“Growers are excited about Preceon,” Wettlaufer said. “When they see growers in the (U.S.) posting on (social media) about 300-plus-bushel corn, we’re getting calls from them wanting to find out more.”
The post Yield boost expected before short-stature corn’s commercial release appeared first on Farmtario.
