The 37th annual MACA conference was recently held at the Bost Extension Center on the MSU campus.
The highlight of the meeting (except for when the projector exploded) was the presentation by John McGillicuddy from Iowa. We had given him the last slot on the program, hoping to allow him the time to begin to scratch the surface of what he knows about corn.
After two and a half hours, he asked “Do you want me to keep going or should we quit now?”. The crowd of consultants yelled “Keep going!”
We eventually took a break, he eventually had to quit, and I am not sure that we quite reached the point where he began to scratch the surface of what this man knows about corn.
To be descriptive, John McGillicuddy could be dubbed a ‘forensic agronomist’. But the interesting thing was that the principles that he shared about corn, the crop that he knows inside and out, can also be applied to cotton, to soybeans, and to almost every other row crop that we can grow.
Understanding the growth habits of a crop, the physiology, and it’s reproductive and survival strategies are all key to understanding which factors have limited the productivity of a field or farm, and are critical to figuring out how to re-capture that lost yield.
Our group of consultants has been perfecting that science for 40 years in cotton, for the past 15 years or so in soybeans, but has only recently begun to offer in-depth consulting for the state’s corn crop.
