Even after 38 years in the business, Jim Schwartz still gets excited about agronomy.

More recently, his excitement has become deep-rooted, one could say. As the director of research, agronomy and practical farm research with Beck’s Hybrids, Schwartz’s latest fascination is spurred by research done by Scott Foxhoven at the University of Illinois that found that root volume can impact corn yields by as much as 50 bushels.

A lot of attention is paid to the corn plant’s health aboveground, but Schwartz says it is becoming more important to pay attention to the health of the plants’ root system, as farmers face increasing input costs along with changes in agricultural practices.

“Some are promoting that producers should narrow corn row widths and increase your populations,” he says. “Well, there’s been a lot of research done that says as we increase populations, root volume decreases 2.5% percent for every 1,000 plants. … If we’re going to recommend growers narrow the row width and increase their populations, we probably ought to know the impact that could have on hybrid performance.”

Schwartz and his Beck’s colleagues replicated Foxhoven’s work by planting corn in a medium that offered little resistance to the roots in metal chemical totes. The resulting massive corn root mass has to be seen to be believed, so look at the accompanying photo.

Admitting that the storage tote root systems cannot be replicated in real-field situations, Schwartz says a lot can be learned and those lessons can be put into practice on farms.

“One of the things we’re going to do next is to take known commodity hybrids that we know have very good stress tolerance, or hybrids that we know perform very well in poorly drained clay soils, put them in these root cages and then say, ‘OK, now maybe all the stress-tolerant ones have these fine root hairs and they have more vertical roots,’” he says.

From what is learned in the root cages, Schwartz says researchers hope to identify correlations leading to causation. “It appears to us that this root architecture corresponds quite well to these conditions,” he says. “That’s really where we want to go, and then what we hope to be able to do is say, ‘OK, Mr. Grower, you like to band your fertility, you plant this population — well, this other hybrid is probably a better selection for you.”

Schwartz admits that discussion strays from the traditional way of thinking of hybrid selection or recommendations. “In the past, I mean, if we’re honest with ourselves, we look at here’s a hybrid that did really, really well last year. Let’s sell that one,” he says. “But then we sell it into all these different environments and conditions, and then it didn’t work for that guy. Gee, I wonder why? We believe a lot of the answer lies belowground.”

Quarter-acre initiative

More and more farmers are implementing technologies that allow them to farm less of the ground in their operations. There are 43,560 square feet in a single acre, and Schwartz says farmers traditionally farm every single one of those square feet.

“In the future, maybe we’ll be farming 11,700 square feet per acre,” he says. “That’s an 8-inch band.” Using the example of John Deere’s See & Spray as emerging technology, Schwartz says farmers will be able to be more precise on placement. “We’ll put down a residual herbicide and then we’ll come back, and instead of spraying all 43,560 square feet, we’re going to start targeting individual weeds.”

Schwartz sees the same to be true for nutrient placement: “To put the fertility right by the seed, maybe we’ll be farming plant by plant.”

If that philosophy becomes mainstream, Schwartz says it’s imperative to understand how to maximize hybrid performance within that zone. “Plant physiologists will tell you that whether it’s root exudates or some kind of biochemical signaling; we know that signaling goes on below the ground,” he says, “so we should probably understand the architecture to quantify that.”

Still a lot to learn

Even though agronomists and plant physiologists have studied plants and root mass for decades, Schwartz says there is much yet to be learned. How soon will that code be broken? “I don’t know if we’ll have the answers before I retire or not,” says the 60-year-old Schwartz, “but I think we’ll be much further down that road.”

For all practical purposes, Schwartz sees farming as risk management and eliminating mistakes. “If we can do things that lower the risk of failure,” he says. “Again, sharing the University of Illinois research, one of the things they think we will discover is that root architecture will probably explain a lot of the variability that we see as it relates to population and tillage practices. … if that’s the case, we can do a better job of placing fertilizer and taking actionable insights, such as do I put my nitrogen 2X2X2, do I use wide-drop, do I band it?”

He remains excited about the subterranean exploration, and all the knowledge that is yet to be gained. Most of all, he is excited about how this knowledge can benefit farmers. “It’s exciting putting all of these pieces of the puzzle together so that a farmer doesn’t have to be the guinea pig.”