David Hula and Alex Harrell Overcome Weather Woes to Win 2024 Yield Contests: What You Can Learn

The 2024 yield contest winners for corn and soybeans joined me on the Successful Farming stage at Commodity Classic to talk about their success, the challenges they faced in 2024, and what they plan on doing differently in the coming growing season.

David Hula of Charles City, Virginia, won the 2024 National Corn Growers Association corn yield contest for the 13th time with 490.6276 bushels per acre on his strip-tilled, irrigated contest plot. In 2023, he set the contest yield record with 623.843 bushels per acre (bpa); he’s the only farmer to exceed 600 bpa in the contest, and he’s done that three times. Hula is a third-generation producer who started farming with his grandfather and dad and now farms around 4,000 acres with his two brothers and sons.

Alex Harrell shattered the world record for soybeans in 2024 with a 218.2856 bpa average on his winning contest plot, breaking his previous record for the second year in a row. He farms about 4,000 acres with his father, Rodney, in Lee and Sumpter Counties in Georgia, growing corn, soybeans, wheat, and watermelon.

 Wild Weather

Since farmers love to talk about the weather, that’s where we began our conversation. Both growers faced significant challenges throughout the season.

“When I look back at 2024, we started out tremendous and the corn came up great. I just felt like, ‘Oh, we’re going to have a really good year again this year,’” Hula said. “Well, we all understand that God is going to humble you somehow, so He quickly did that. We had a little wet spell and then it turned off dry and we were literally making corn by irrigating … and I’ve never had to do that. Later in the season, we just got extremely hot … we were waking up to 85 degrees, so the corn never had a chance to cool down.”

Irrigating brought its own set of challenges for Hula in 2024. The water is sourced from the James River, which empties into the Chesapeake Bay, then the Atlantic Ocean. When dry conditions occur and there’s a lack of water coming downstream, Hula explained the saltwater moves upstream. “It’s not a problem from a standpoint of ruining the soil, because we get an average of 44 inches of rain, so it just flushes that sodium out of the soil,” he said. “The crop can respond to sodium up to a point, and then when you irrigate it that one last time, the crop just shuts down.”

He uses a salinity meter to monitor the source and avoid crop damage, but said his grandfather had another method. “He realized that if they’re catching commercial crabs right in front of our inlet where our pump is, we’ve got three weeks if it doesn’t rain before we have to cut the pivots off,” he said. “That’s just as good for us as running a meter.”

A few counties north of Hula’s property, he said some farmers had no choice but to bush hog what was left of their corn crop because of toxins caused by the drought and low yields.

Harrell struggled with weather in Georgia, too. “Corn overall was 60 bushels off from the year before,” he said. “With the nighttime temperatures, we couldn’t cool down the plant, and we didn’t get rain for 61 days in a row, so about mid-May to mid-July, so that definitely didn’t help.” He said his dryland corn was “pretty much non-existent.”

Yield Contest Methods

Both growers said they plant for normal production across all of their acres. Once the crop emerges, they make decisions on which plots will be used for the contests, and it’s how they are treated from that point on that makes the difference between regular and high-yield acres. “I don’t know if it’s going to be a high-yield environment until it comes up,” Hula said.

“We just have a checklist and as the season goes on and we miss opportunities or things go down, tissue levels go down, nutrient levels go down, or weather events happen, we’ll just scratch those fields off and they just become regular corn or regular soybeans and they’re not high-yield fields, but at the beginning they’re all treated equally,” Harrell said. “They’re all done the exact same up until we check emergence and singulation and then we start tissue sampling.”

Hula’s winning corn crop followed soybeans in the rotation. He planted Pioneer P14830VYH R, a 114-day high total fermentable hybrid for the dry grind ethanol market containing Optimum AcreMax Leptra, which pyramids above-ground traits with LibertyLink and Roundup Ready tolerances. He planted in 30-inch rows and recorded a harvest population of 47,900 plants per acre. The crop received 420 pounds of nitrogen, 137 pounds of phosphorus, 360 pounds of potash, 6 pounds of boron, 60 pounds of sulfur and 15 pounds of zinc. Application methods included a Soil Warrior strip-till machine, a starter application made with EZ-Drops mounted on the John Deere sprayer and 2 tons of chicken litter per acre.

 Harrell planted Pioneer P49Z02E soybean seed from its new Z-Series. The 4.9 relative maturity seed was planted in 30-inch rows with 110,000 seeds per acre. The soil was red clay watered by center pivot irrigation. He used less pre-plant chicken litter than in years past, then double strip tilled at planting, applying a mix of humic acid, fulvic acid, biologicals and PGRs delivered both in-furrow and using a 3×3 system, with an herbicide mix broadcast out the back.

 One adjustment Harrell made this year was with the seeding rate. He went from 85,000 seeds per acre in 2023 to 115,000 seeds per acre in 2024 with a final population of 113,000 plants per acre. “In ’23 on the high yield [soybeans], they just limbed out so much, and the limbs were actually breaking off and falling on the ground, so we wanted to thicken that up,” he said. “But then the whole plant falls over. I think when you’re putting that much weight on those plants, it’s just hard to make them stand up.”

 Harrell talked about the effect of singulation on soybeans, and his 2024 experiment on the role spacing plays in yield. “I went out and picked one row. I pulled 30 plants off that row. I pulled 10 plants that were what I’d call perfectly singulated, 10 plants that were middle of the road, and 10 plants that were poorly singulated close together,” he said. “There were 64% more beans on the ones that singulated vs. poorly singulated, so 100 bushel beans go to 164 bushel beans just because we singulate them right. And they were on the same row inches apart, so there was no extra fertilizer, no extra rain, no anything like that. They were just planted right and had the proper singulation.”

 Ongoing Tests

 Once the crop emerged, Harrell conducted weekly tissue sampling then applied foliar fertility based on the results primarily using Y-drops and drones. Weed control was achieved with two applications of Enlist and glyphosate herbicides, and the plot was treated with multiple fungicide passes. “We’ve got key nutrient levels we want to check there,” he said. “As we’re checking boxes throughout the growing season, that’s when we really hone in on the fields that we’re going to push.”

 Hula also did weekly tissue sampling. “We’ve been pulling them every week for almost 28 years now, so it’s an integral part of our operation,” he said.

 While those tissue samples are important to both growers, Hula said producers need to know what their nutrition levels should be throughout the growing season based on their yield goal. “If [the tests] don’t ask you what your yield goal is, how do you interpret those results? Is it sufficient for 150 bushel corn or 250 bushel corn?” he asked. “The tissue sample is the key, but it’s just giving you a benchmark for that particular day.”

 At What Cost?

 With all the inputs used on the winning plots, Hula said his costs not including land rent were $1,810 per acre. “That’s now what we’re paying for everything else across our farm, but to get that kind of yield, you have to add more fertility to it,” he said. “We had a much higher airplane bill because we were spraying multiple times. … I would challenge everybody to try a fungicide if they haven’t done it.”

 Fungicides are important to both the corn and soybeans on Harrell’s farm. “Every time it rains out of the Gulf of Mexico, it usually brings something with it, so on corn we’re making 2-4 applications from early season to post, and on soybeans, we’re making 2-5 applications,” he said. “There’s no application for us that would be a bigger ROI than fungicide, because if we don’t spray it, it can be a huge loss.”

 Harrell said he didn’t have final numbers for 2024, but the year prior, he had $1,530 per acre invested in his high-yield beans. “Obviously we’re not spending that on every acre because you won’t get it back. It takes twice as much food to feed two cows as it does one cow, and it’s the same thing with a plant. We have to put fertilizer out there to feed it.”

 Still, Harrell says, those high-yield acres made a profit. “Even though they’re a small amount of acres, [the winning yield plots] are probably the most profitable acres we have,” he said. “The ROI is there, but obviously we’re not going to spend that on 1,000 acres.”

 What’s Next?

 The 2025 planting season is fast approaching for both Hula and Herrell. While they both seem to have perfected their method for achieving high yields, they still strive to make improvements.

 Harrell says one thing he plans to do more of in 2025 is planting multiple populations across each field. “Let’s say our average seeding on this field is going to be 32,000. We’re going to go plus or minus 4,000 on that, so we’ll have a third of the field at 28,000, a third at 32,000, and a third at 36,000,” he said. “In 2024, we had 30,000-bushel corn beating 36,000-bushel corn by a substantial amount, and we can’t predict what the growing season is going to bring when we plant, so we have to spread that risk.” On fields where he’s planted multiple populations in the past, he saw higher overall averages than those planted at a flat rate.

 Hula says he’s excited about a new corn hybrid for this year. “Pioneer says they have a better corn hybrid, so I’m going to try that one out,” he said. “2025 is going to be a tough year. May God bless you all as he blesses your seeds.”