 On Friday, it was a standing room only crowd at the North Carolina Soybean Producers Association meeting to hear guest speaker Kip Cullers, soybean producer from Purdy, Missouri.
In three of the past five years, Kip has broken his own record in bushels per acre soybean production and at the meeting he shared some of his secrets with southern bean producers:
"Southern growers are really a pleasure to talk to, they kind of think like I do... it's just always a pleasure to come south."
One of the secrets that you shared today about some of your award winning fields, actually I was told yesterday, and I had to be told three times before I would believe it, and that would be...
"Well, we made 160.6 bushels per acre with new life series beans from Pioneer. It worked real well for us. We don't grow that particular variety in all of our normal production acreage, but it was just one of the varieties that worked real well. We took it out of one of our test plots. It worked real good but like I said, we don't grow it anywhere except for contests."
And you also add a little extra treatment there whenever the plants are about four or five days old:
"On our beans, this year we tried something new. We decided we had to control this height. Our beans get too tall and so whenever they were about 2 1/2 tri-folates we hit them with a full rate of cobra and heated it up with some crop oil and some 32%. What we were trying to do kill the main growing point and cause these plants to branch out and shorten the method. Actually, it worked, you know not everything I do always works but that particular experiment did work."
Well, you do have a reputation for thinking out of the box and trying to solve some problems:
"We're always trying something new. You know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I got kind of caught up in that, I was doing the same thing over and over the last couple of years and we weren't making any real progress so I decided to try and mix it up, and try something new and different."
Of course the 2011 growing season is right here on the horizon, any new experiments for this year?
"I can assure you with $14 beans and $6.50 corn, we're going to try a lot of things this coming year because we need to raise a big crop and we need to raise a huge crop... so that's the goal... and take advantage of these high prices because they probably won't be around here forever."
Kip also strongly believes in liquid seed treatments, stringent weed control, and scouting every field every day.
Award winning soybean grower, Kip Cullers speaking to the NC Soybean Producers meeting at the Southern Farm Show 2011
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