December 16 – Ovid, Mich. – Great Lakes Hybrids won 18 state champions out of its 52 entries in the 2005 National Corn Growers Association’s National Corn Yield Contest. Great Lakes had six winners in Kentucky, three in Michigan and Tennessee, two each in Illinois and Ohio and one in Indiana and Missouri.
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Farmers experience year -on-year improvements from biotech crops

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Dec. 6, 2005)—As a result of increasing benefits from biotechnology -derived (biotech) crop varieties, farmers are adopting the technology with greater ease than ever before, according to a new study update released by the National Center of Food and Agricultural Policy (NCFAP).
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Trait Decisions In Corn – Part I: Don’t Forget About Performance
Mark Loux, Ron Hammond, Bruce Eisley, Peter Thomison

Corn hybrid selection is becoming more complicated, as companies increasingly introduce specific traits that are contained in the seed and incorporated into seed prices.
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From Farmgate.com (U of I’s new agricultural blog): The purple deadnettle thriving in your fields this winter has a nasty secret just discovered by agronomists at Purdue. Those cute little plants, which some Master Gardeners will sell to each other at their spring plant sales, have been found to serve as hosts for soybean cyst nematodes when there are no soybeans in that field; either during the winter or when the field is planted to corn. “SCN infests purple deadnettle roots, just like they do on a susceptible soybean variety,” said Bill Johnson, a Purdue weed scientist. To protect soybean plants from the pest, researchers are trying to find the best timing to control purple deadnettle to reduce nematode densities.
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Soy Capital Ag Services just released their data and here’s our super results from those corn trials:
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Growers Gain Added Flexibility when Combining Seed and Crop Protection Product Purchases

OVID, MICH.—December 12, 2005—Great Lakes Hybrids announces a revolutionary new option for growers to help finance both seed and crop protection product purchases for the 2006 growing season.
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch (KRT) via NewsEdge Corporation : The Illinois Farm Bureau is urging a fresh look at federal laws that bar farmers from keeping patented plants’ seeds from one year to the next.
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Agricultural decision-makers have a new place to start their day: “The Farm Gate”, an Internet blog updated daily by University of Illinois Extension.
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Corn-after-corn production may be less profitable than soybean production in 2006, meaning the recent trend of increasing corn production may end, according to a University of Illinois Extension study.
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12/05/2005 URBANA, Ill.—While other factors will influence corn and soybean prices over the next few months—particularly South American weather and crop conditions—a continuation of the current slow pace of export sales would limit price rallies, said University of Illinois Extension marketing specialist Darrel Good.
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