Dry leaves and stalks crunched under the boots of Weld County farmer Jeff Marsh as he went to check on the corn he grew. He doesn’t have high hopes after this year’s hot and dry summer.
“It's been a tough year, one where you had to figure out, are you gonna have enough water?” Marsh said. “The longer I'm in agriculture, the more I've learned we pretty much just live on a hope and a prayer every year.”
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Once he took a closer look at his corn, he was shocked that it turned out alright.
“I've got silks coming out the ends. I mean, that's a good sign, there’s health,” Marsh said. “I do like the height. I mean, a tall plant usually makes a little better ear. It just goes without saying.”
This corn isn’t from his land out at Drake Farms in Eaton, a small town east of Fort Collins. It was grown at one of Colorado State University’s research farms as part of the Testing Ag Performance Solutions (TAPS) competition.
Marsh and around 70 others – from the local, state and federal level – are competing side-by-side on the same plot of land with the same soil and weather. The conditions force them to make tough decisions – like how much water to use, or how far apart the corn should grow. They also manage a farm budget and simulate marketing their corn.
“Farmers love to compete,” Amy Kremen, Associate Director of the Irrigation Innovation Consortium, which manages the competition, said. “They also love to improve and love to learn from their peers.”
Kremen said these decisions are becoming more critical for farmers as water resources decline and production costs for diesel and fertilizer increase. She said even if farmers pick the same variables, the devil’s in the details – and those details can greatly impact profitability.
“Farmers could both use 11 inches, a similar corn variety and seeding rate, but have very different yields, and it all comes down to timing,” Kremen said. “We can pull these insights out of the data…and we can show when and how people could dial in a little bit more.”
Researchers then take what farmers do well – and don’t do so well – and use it to refine what they present as best practices. They are looking to local farmers to compete to help them fill in the blanks of what they don’t know about their current decisions.
“Instead of doing research first and telling people about it after, this flips it on its head,” Kremen said. “The farmers, they're the stars. And we're actually learning from them how management works and how it can actually be sustained.”
Marsh played with variables as a learning experience. To make matters more challenging, he chose to compete with limited irrigation – around 11 inches of water – as one of his variables. That forced him to redesign his planning process.
“I started thinking, ‘Okay, we're going to back off our population, we're going to back off how much fertilizer we use,” Marsh said. “We're going to be cheaper as far as costs, but we're also not going to have as much to sell in the end.”
But the competition gave him access to tools, like probes that keep track of moisture in the ground. He said there were times he was going to water more, but the probe told him he could hold out a little bit longer. That was valuable information.
“When you can hear what your soil is saying, you can do so much more,” Marsh said.
Marsh said taking risks on the research farm made him realize that he needs to adapt what he’s doing on his own farm so his crops can withstand drought in the future.
“You get so one-tracked that you think, ‘Well, this is what Dad did, this was what Grandpa did,’ and I see it even just out by my neighbors,” Marsh said. “We can't do it like Grandpa and Dad did. We've got to realize that we have got to be able to use resources in a way that's manageable for everybody.”
Marsh and the other competitors will be judged on their efficiency, profitability and yield. Winners will be announced in January.
This is the fourth year the competition has been held at CSU.
