Our brand promise, STINE® HAS YIELD, isn’t just a slogan. It’s our commitment to develop, offer and place the highest-yielding products on growers’ operations. Our access to the industry’s leading soybean breeding programs, innovative corn research and agility to make timely decisions allow us to test more unique material and bring higher-yielding products to growers faster. Our advantage lies in the scope and quality of our research, thorough product selection and testing process, and data-backed performance from our Stine Elite Yield Trials.
Most seed companies conduct seed trials, but it’s the sheer scale of our research and testing programs, coupled with the best genetics from the corn and soybean breeding programs we use, that set Stine apart.
“Breeding is a numbers game,” says Warren Stine, assistant director of corn research. “You must have high volume to increase your chances of finding good things. We not only have the most data, especially on the soybean side, but we also have the highest-quality data of any testing out there.”
From humble beginnings
In the 1960s Harry Stine began “yield checking” soybean lines — work previously only done by universities — which eventually inspired Stine’s Elite Trials program. Harry recognized what a large-scale, efficient testing program could bring to the soybean industry back then. Because of his intuition and fearless leadership in innovation, Stine now operates the largest soybean research and testing system in the world.
“Nobody has as many entries in soybean testing as we do,” notes Warren Stine.
On the corn side, we first started our breeding program in 1978 and eventually began testing hybrids in the Elite Yield Trials in the early ’80s. Stine’s corn elite testing program continues to grow each year, with the goal of having the largest corn research and breeding program in the industry.
“At this point in time, we are about as big as any of the big players,” says Warren Stine. “Our goal is to surpass the big players in corn breeding and research in the future, and that’s more attainable for us than others as a privately owned company.”
The inner workings of Elite Yield Trials
Stine’s Elite Yield Trials are the third year of the multiyear testing undergone by corn and soybean products being considered for commercialization. Brian Hartman, Stine’s national corn product manager, describes the Elite Yield Trials as our internal research and testing program to advance products.
“For corn, we test four different maturity ranges — early, early-mid, full-season and late. We test different corn products in various populations and research standability, yield and emergence. We also look at plant architecture and compare our newest material to proven material in the marketplace,” Hartman adds.
For soybeans, our primary focus is yield, but we also concentrate on traits, maturity and stress tolerance.
The first couple years of testing are our Pre-Elite Trials. Only 5% of products evaluated in our Pre-Elite Trials move on to our Elite Yield Trials. At each step, as we narrow the number of products we are evaluating, we are increasing the number of repetitions and the number of locations tested for each. From there, less than 2% of those evaluated in Elite Yield Trials are ever commercialized.
Only the best of the best in our Elite Yield Trials advance to market. The rest essentially gets discarded.
“The process is tedious, but it's why it's the best," says Hartman. "We take an in-depth look at how these products perform against different variables over a wide geography and average results from those areas. We’re testing for broad adaptability — not everyone does that. This helps us sell our products with confidence.”
It’s not what Stine does but rather how we do it that separates us from the rest of the industry.
"Uniformity is key in our corn and soybean Elite Trials," says Jason Behn, head of corn research for Stine. "We make sure every variable is aligned, including fertilizer and herbicide applications, the soil types the products are placed in, and planting space and population. We want all products to have an equal playing field throughout the process, including the competitor products we test our material against."
Another advantage that's truly unique to our program is we're the only seed company actively testing in narrow rows for both corn and soybeans.
"We stand behind our belief that narrow rows are the way of the future and the best way to get more plants per acre for more yield across the board," says Warren Stine.
Over the past few years, our soybean Elite Yield Trials have grown tremendously — an increase of 15% year-over-year. We're also seeing growth in our corn Elite Yield Trials, which have doubled from last year. This means it's all hands on deck to ensure the process for each plot runs smoothly.
“The number of people involved in overseeing this process — from our nursery workers and our South American team to our techs and planting and harvesting crews — is massive,” says Warren Stine. “This is the start of a watershed year for us. We’ve never had a program this big. It’s going to impact how we go forward in ways we haven’t seen yet.”
The value to growers
Stine’s Elite Yield Trials are an integral part of delivering on the STINE HAS YIELD promise. It’s our commitment to yield, the scope and quality of our research, our meticulous selection and testing process and our investment in continuous research that deliver value to our grower customers.
“We don’t want failures out there,” says Hartman. “We want to advance the products we know we can trust in growers’ fields, and we want to place them in environments where we know they will perform because we have the data to back it up. That’s the endgame.”
When it comes to research, yield is what matters most. But how we get there is also important.
“We have more product repetitions in our Elite Yield Trials than in our Pre-Elite Trials,” says Behn. “This means we plant more seed, conduct more research and review more data points, which ultimately ensures we’re looking at how that product performs against several different environmental and agronomic variables. We want a real-world look at how these products perform when they hit the field.”
We can say with a high degree of certainty how our products perform in certain situations and field environments. The more we grow our program, the better our data will be, which will equate to more confidence in our products and placement guidance.
“On the sales side, the value of Stine Elite Yield Trials is in the sheer amount and quality of data,” says Dustin Ellis, Stine regional sales agronomist. “Each year, the production team provides our sales reps with yield maturity graphs that include data points from the hundreds of thousands of plots they place each year. We use these graphs to show growers the trend lines of product performance, including those of our competitors. It’s truly unbiased research they can trust and is what growers want and need to help them make more informed decisions.”
Stay tuned for next week’s edition of Stine Weekly as we dive deeper into Stine’s corn Elite Yield Trials. In the meantime, be sure to contact your local rep on our Find Stine page for information on our products and agronomic services.