Looking ahead to 2021, agronomists with Wyffels Hybrids and Dekalb say farmers should prepare for both dry and wet conditions with hybrid selection. Why? 2020 showed Illinois farmers why it pays to pick a diverse lineup of hybrids.

While weather is uncontrollable, the agronomists say hybrid selection gives farmers a way to spread their weather-related risks. Here are three hybrid selection takeaways to learn from 2020 in Illinois:

Spread maturities. Brent Tharp, Wyffels Hybrids technical product manager, says farmers should spread their risk with hybrid maturity selection. A hybrid mix should be 25% early, 50% target and 25% late for the farm’s maturity zone, which varies from north to south.

“There are years where your later hybrids have a big advantage over your early hybrids, and then you’ll get a year where that flips,” Tharp says. “If you follow this rule of thumb, you’ll hedge your risk for both scenarios.”

When it comes to spreading risk with planting dates, Tharp says Illinois farmers picked April 20 as one of the most popular days for planting corn in 2020. With the wet and cool conditions that set in across most of the state after that, it’s no surprise a record amount of Wyffel’s Illinois corn was replanted, with twice the companywide average this year in the state.

Related: Replant: Bucking a 40-year trend

Unusually cool and saturated conditions in April and May delayed emergence. In the case of late-April-planted hybrids in some areas, Tharp says seed sat in the ground for more than 15 days. This resulted in stand losses and uneven emergence.

“If you had asked me who would yield better, Iowa or Illinois, I would have said Iowa all the way up until early July,” Tharp says, referring to the onset of drought conditions.

Prepare for dry heat. Because drought conditions hit during grain fill, hybrids with strong drought and stress tolerance tended to behave better this year, says Jim Donnelly, an agronomist with Dekalb covering northern Illinois.

While central and southern parts of Illinois were able to catch July rains, a drought set up in Iowa and eventually extended into northern Illinois. By August, all of Illinois was dry, aside from the occasional small shower and more widespread wet conditions in the state’s southernmost counties.

With a stretch of five to seven days with temperatures above 90 degrees F, Donnelly says plants were stressed. They hit grain fill with an average number of kernels, but with the dry conditions, the kernels were smaller than normal in some areas. This impacted 2020 corn yields in Illinois, which USDA averaged at 203 bushels per acre in September.

“For the northern Illinois territory I cover, we had adequate soil moisture into July. That’s when it started turning dry for us,” Donnelly says, explaining that corn crops optimistically set kernels when conditions were better. As conditions worsened, plants in the most drought-affected soils were forced to cannibalize the stalk to fill grain.

Look past the noise. Yield trials produced even more varied results than usual in 2020, Tharp says. That’s because grain fill happened during drought conditions, a situation which he says usually creates some “bounce” in yield results. Drought happened in both Illinois and Iowa during the 2020 growing season.

“To look past that, you need to look at hybrids over multiple locations and not just pay attention to how the hybrid did in one local plot,” Tharp says, referring to plot data his company and competitors release every year. He says part of the bounce can be attributed to stand losses and low emergence from cool, wet conditions early in the season.

Tharp says he values stay-green potential and drought tolerance in diversifying a farm’s hybrid selection to prepare for years like 2020, which, he concludes, “had too much rain early in the season and not enough in the middle and end.”