About our Grower Strip Trial Results
I hope this letter finds you pleased with your 2010 beet harvest and results. It seemed a very good year for most growers in most areas. Now if we only knew what 2011 will bring and what we’ll be able to plant!
This issue includes our Grower Strip Trials and as you can see they are all Roundup Ready® varieties including our commercial varieties and new experimental varieties. At this time we still cannot plant RR in 2011, but want you to see the varieties we’ve been working on for you.
I also wanted to explain how our strip trial process works. Every plot is planted and harvested using the grower’s equipment. We bring the seed, a generator and a vacuum. We help fill the grower’s planter with the Seedex varieties we want to test and any other varieties the grower has purchased and wants to compare them to. We plant a full round the length of the field. During the growing season we take stand counts and notes on disease tolerance, etc.
At harvest we lift the length of the field and send the truck to the factory or piler regardless of how full it is. The truck is weighed and samples are taken for quality along with any tare sample and left to be processed through the factory labs. Once the grower receives his analysis from the factory he shares a copy of the results with us.
We feel grower plots are an unbiased way to compare varieties on their farm; planted, managed and harvested the way they do the rest of their beets. If you have any questions or would like more information on any of our Seedex varieties please contact your local dealer or me!
Thank you,
Michael Dohman
View the 2010 Grower Strip Trials: All Locations, Climax, Drayton, Eldred, Foxhome, Hillsboro, Kent, Nielsville and Ulen