January 30, 2023 Edition
“Magic is better!”
“No. Jordan!
Jordan’s the best.”
“What makes you two young
fellows think ‘The Magic Man’ or ‘MJ’ is better than ‘Larry Legend’?”
“More MVPs! Magic won three in a row!”
“Are you sure about
that? You better ask your father which
NBA players won three MVPs in a row.”
Two young fans and
myself at the local basketball game.
I
attended the Univ. of North Dakota’s “Betty” the other week for a men’s
basketball game and I decided to break-out my Larry Bird jersey for the
occasion. A group of young boys,
probably around 9 to 10 years of age, noticed my jersey and by halftime a
couple of them decided to start talking and bragging-up their favorite players
from the era (the power of YouTube is crazy).
Unfortunately, the debate and dialogue didn’t last very long as one of
the young fellows pulled out his gadget with a screen. After a minute or two, he and his sidekick
whispered a few particulars and then responded, “Magic won three, but Jordan
had one in-between”. I snickered when
the kids didn’t admit who actually did win three in a row during that era.
The
NBA’s MVP award has been decided by a large panel of sports media folks since
the 1980 season; prior to then the vote was by the players. With the award being strictly based on voter
opinion, everyone can find a disagreement or two. For example, how does a player average 44.8
points and 24.3 rebounds per game – both tops in the league for the particular
season – and come in 7th place for MVP voting (Wilt Chamberlain –
1963). Let alone Wilt’s second place MVP
vote finish when he averaged 50.4 points and 25.7 rebounds per game (1962). Anyway, let's take a minute and dive into the
history of the NBA MVP winners and see what these young basketball minds found
out on their pocket computer.
To
start, there are 15 different players that have won the NBA MVP award multiple
times, and two different players from the ABA with multiple MVP wins as
well. However, there are only nine
players who have won the award on three or more occasions, making them eligible
for our coveted list of three consecutive MVPs – an unwritten benchmark for
‘best of the best’.
Topping
the list of multiple MVP awards goes to the “Big Fella” with the sky-hook –
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sits alone in the top spot with six MVP trophies. Michael Jordan and Bill Russel are the only
two men with five MVP awards. There are
three players at four MVP wins apiece – Wilt Chamberlain, LeBron James, and Julius
Erving (3 ABA; 1 NBA). And, then there
are three players with three MVP wins – Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Moses
Malone. So, which of these nine players
won three MVP titles consecutively? Only
a third of them – Russell from 1961-’63, Chamberlain from 1966-’68, and Bird
from 1984-’86 are the only three to achieve the feat in all of NBA history. I’d personally place Julius Erving from
1974-’76 (ABA) on this list as well, even though he split the 1975 award with
George McGinnis and the ABA was considered a slightly less talented league than
the NBA – which is highly debatable, and I’d argue that the best players of
both leagues were just as talented. Here
in the year 2023, Nikola Jokic from the Denver Nuggets has won the award the
prior two seasons and is having another outstanding campaign to potentially
join the coveted list of back-to-back-to-back MVP winners.
http://www.remembertheaba.com/abastatistics/abanbaexhibitions.html
https://www.basketball-reference.com/awards/mvp.html
Who
is the MVP of your farm operation? Many
farm managers will often point to at least a couple key employees that make the
day-to-day tasks in the business run a little smoother. No matter who your MVPs are within your
business, pat yourself on the back for creating a good working environment for
them to prosper, engage with their teammates, and have the confidence to tackle
all the tasks you and Mother Nature set before them.
Phantom
Yield Loss in Corn
This topic is always a hot debate for the Midwest’s and
west’s corn producers, but how should corn farmers feel about it in the far
Northern Plains of North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota? It’s difficult to answer that question
directly as many autumn harvest seasons just do not produce adequate weather to
dry corn naturally and significantly in the field. I’ve worked with a few corn producers over
the years to plant a 75 RM hybrid in our 80-85 RM environment with the goal of
trying to hit some early market opportunities or at least obtain an earlier harvest
start date. Our conclusions at the end
of the 2–3-year trial time frame was the weather didn’t consistently cooperate
to achieve the harvest objective, and the yield penalty to switch to the
earlier RM hybrid was not recoverable.
At the end of the day, in our region, our strategy entailed planting
medium to full season maturities (80-90 RM hybrids) to capture yield potential
and then utilize the on-farm grain drier and storage to enhance grain marketing
opportunities.
To play devil’s advocate, the autumn of 2022 in our region
did experience very good weather for natural corn grain dry-down in the field. When these conditions do come into play, what
should be our strategy? Well, I could
not find local data on the topic, but I do have a teammate down in Nebraska
that has been trying to answer this question over the past five years with on
farm trial data.
His region of south central to southeastern Nebraska is
showing some year-to-year variability, but on average there was a “phantom”
loss of 2.4 bushel/ac per point of grain moisture. The data was collected with two different
harvest timings – initial harvest timing, and then a significant part of the
field is left for a later harvest timing and drier grain. All yield data was collected with a scale (no
yield monitor data) and correlated to 15.5% grain moisture. The other interesting insight with this data
set (2nd chart below), is the fact that as you get a wider window between
harvest timings (around 5.0 points of grain moisture separation between the
first and second harvest timings), the yield variability had greater swings. In visiting with the author of this data, his
theory is that individual kernels begin to breakdown in the field due to fungi,
insect, stress cracks, silk cutting, and other issues. As the grain becomes drier, it is easier for
the combine to breakdown and discard these kernels. However, a few fields may experience very good
late season plant health and thus express minimal differences in yield between two
different harvest timing dates. Any locations
that had significant stalk lodging, root lodging, or header/combine loss at
harvest were discarded from the final data set.
Even though we’re about 600 miles north of south-central
Nebraska, I’d bet we’d experience similar data in a year like 2022. Therefore, I’ll conclude there is solid reasoning why
the significant corn farmers of our region have invested in drying and storage
of their crop – year in and year out, it allows them to plant full season hybrids
to capture more yield, allows them to target corn harvest at 20-24% to avoid
phantom yield loss, gives them an avenue to harvest corn in
the fall vs winter in wet/cool autumns, and gives them more marketing flexibility
to capture profitability.
https://twitter.com/micksterbrau/status/1584732502043889664?s=12&t=aT7RbCBnQOCeAq11qBVtgA
Winter
Enlist Webinars
I’m going to post
these Corteva on-line webinars again as a repeat from last month since there
are still many opportunities to engage.
However, one of the many benefits of the Enlist herbicide system in soybeans
is no formal training or class work is required by applicators – engage as
desired.
Enlist Webinars
Announced for 2022-2023: For all upcoming
webinars, Register Here.
Applicator Training with Enlist Label
Reminders (Choose one of
the following dates):
- Feb. 14,
2023, at 9 a.m. CT
- March 14,
2023, at 8 a.m. CT
Special
Series: Seed Selection + Enlist Weed Control System vs. In-crop Dicamba System (Choose one of the following dates):
Special
Series: Set Your Operation Up for Success with the Enlist Weed Control System (Choose one of the following dates)
- Feb. 7,
2023, at 8 a.m. CT
- Mar. 16,
2023, at 9 a.m. CT
- Apr. 6, 2023, at 8 a.m. CT
Hybrid
Spring Wheat to hit the Northern Plains
Syngenta has announced their intentions to release hybrid spring
wheat in our region. The target is
somewhere between 5,000 to 7,000 commercial acres for 2023 planting. Bayer, BASF and Corteva are also working on
the venture to bring hybrid spring wheat to North American farmers and plan to
have hybrid releases available for sale at some point during the next 10 years.
Now most newsletter authors would probably just stop there, but
since I have a well-educated audience, the question will inevitably arise, “why
has hybrid corn been around since the 1930’s and we are just now getting hybrid
wheat - almost a full century later in history?” Well, let’s have a little fun by diving into the
challenges of making hybrid wheat and how it’s vastly different than breeding
hybrid corn – I promise to try and keep it simple and concise!
Hybrid wheat will differ from conventional wheat with the
pollination or kernel fertilization growth stage. In a conventional wheat variety, the plant
undergoes a natural self-fertilization process where both males and female
reproductive parts are located on the same plant (termed “monoecious” – meaning
“one house”). Therefore, if a hybrid (defined
as a cross between two genetically different and pure parents) was desired, the
process of fertilization must be completely separated. The ability to mass scale the process would
also be critical for seeding tens-of-thousands of acres of the progeny under
broadacre farm production.
For hybrid corn (maize) development, the process was fairly simple
for breeders to execute since that particular monoecious plant had the male
pollen expressed though the tassel (at the very top of the plant), and the female
was expressed with the silks of the ear in the middle area of the plant – a
couple feet physically lower than the tassel.
Thus, corn plant breeders materially removed the tassel a couple days
before expression from one inbred parent (making those plants female by
default) and then letting the pollen of another inbred of different genetics (males)
fertilize the intended females. Shortly
after the fertilization process, the males were destroyed to insure only seed
from the females were harvested. Seed
corn producers often plant a row or two of males for every three to six rows of
females and allow nature (wind) to move the millions of extremely light weight
pollen grains per male plant to fertilize the hundreds of silks/ovules per
female plant. This process
revolutionized corn plant breeding and hybrid vigor gains led to very quick advances
in productivity – the average production per acre was fairly stagnant at around
25-30 bu/ac in the decades leading to and including the 1920’s. Today, corn productivity is approaching 180
bu/ac!
https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/07/perspectives-on-national-u-s-corn-yields....
Unfortunately, the male and female parts of a wheat plant are
contained in the same flower (only separated physically on the plant by a
millimeter or two at most), which makes the process more complex to reach a
significant volume of produced hybrid seed.
Traditional wheat variety breeders make genetic crosses in the laboratory
by using tweezers to remove anthers from females and introduce pollen from
desired males to subsequently fertilize the female ovules – a tedious labor-intensive
process and after the cross, it takes many generations of seed production to
ramp-up significant volumes.
The initial concept of potentially developing hybrid wheat dates back
to the 1950’s when plant breeders discovered a procedure to create cytoplasmic
male sterility (CMS) germplasm. This
procedure basically renders a monoecious plant as female reproducing only
(pollen may still be produced but is not viable). With the invention of CMS, came the ability to
easily produce a high volume of plants which would accept a different source of
genetics through introduced pollen.
Basically, the CMS line becomes the female parent, and another variety
(non-CMS) becomes the male. If you then
harvest only the females, you have basically created a hybrid. However, in this system as described, the
harvested progeny (F1) expresses an unpredictable mix of male sterility and
male fertility – potential problem of liability for the breeding company selling
the F1 hybrid seed to farmer customers. Even
with the selection and implementation of “restorer” genes – restores male
fertility to the offspring of CMS female lines – the process is not as clean
and straightforward as desired, plus it dramatically enhances the complexity of
the entire hybrid wheat breeding process.
Lastly, wheat pollen is very heavy as 90% of the male pollen will fall
at the base of the plant, creating further issues when planning large scale
hybrid seed production.
At the end of the day, the cost of producing and maintaining three
different genetic lines (CMS female, non-CMS maintainer male, and restorer) to garner
large volumes of hybrid wheat seed is very expensive. Additionally, at the end of the breeding cycle,
F1 hybrid wheat seed still contains some level of male sterility. Current research reveals today’s plant
breeders are finding better restorer genes and working combinations of those
restorer genes to increase the chances of profitability for both the breeding team
and the farmer customer who ultimately plants and raises the product. It’ll be interesting to see over the next few
years if Syngenta can demonstrate consistent hybrid wheat performance,
consistent hybrid wheat supply for their customers, and consistent
profitability in their business venture.
https://news.agropages.com/News/NewsDetail---45130.htm
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21225-0
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.20.162644v3.full
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