Trial Objective
- Largely due to the widespread adoption of treated soybean seed, growers now plant soybeans increasingly earlier than ever before. For example, Illinois farmers had 31 percent of their soybean crop planted by May 3, 2020, compared to the previous 5-year average of 12 percent.1
This research was conducted with a goal of understanding not only the yield impact of planting soybeans at different dates, but also the agronomic characteristics which enable early planted beans to have higher yield potential.
The main driver of yield potential increase in early planted beans is the ability for the plants to create more nodes before flowering.2 We measured the number of nodes created and days to flowering to better understand this interaction.