Episode 189: Why Your Nitrogen Program Is Costing You 50 Bushels with Ed Baumgartner

Ed Baumgartner is a corn breeder and co-founder of Bass Hybrids in Olivia, Minnesota. His family has been in the seed corn business since the late 1930s, when his great uncles began producing hybrid seed as Troy Farms. Ed studied agronomy and plant genetics and spent 21 years and five mergers inside the commercial seed industry, much of it running winter nurseries in Puerto Rico and doing trait integration work for major companies.

At Bass Hybrids, Ed breeds non-GMO corn using a shuttle breeding model borrowed from Norman Borlaug, cycling material between Puerto Rico and Minnesota for three generations a year under deliberate heat, drought, and disease stress. Working in 18 identified genetic families rather than the industry's two, he has selected for native insect tolerance and broad stress resilience and found those selections also produced plants with unusually strong microbial association and markedly lower nitrogen requirements. His current work includes nitrogen rate trials across genetics, interseeded cover crop studies in three states, and a 148-acre discovery farm dedicated entirely to regenerative research.

In this episode, John and Ed discuss:

• Why corn inbreds developed before heavy nitrogen fertilization still carry the genetics for nutrient efficiency
• How some Bass hybrids produce 200 bushel corn on 50 pounds of applied nitrogen, and drop to 150 bushels when nitrogen is pushed above 200
• Why Y-drop nitrogen placed too close to the stalk causes a yield hit on biologically responsive genetics
• The plant characteristics that signal high biological receptivity, including pubescence, leathery leaves, multiple ears, and heavy pollen loads
• Results from interseeding nine species of cover crops at V3, where the highest yielding treatment came with nitrogen cut by 25 percent
• Why Bass asked its seed producers to apply AEA's Pinion this season in place of conventional fungicide
• How AEA's fertility guidance gives growers an off-ramp from high nitrogen and an on-ramp for soil biology
• What germinator trials revealed about fungicide-treated seed versus seed grown without fungicides

Additional Resources

To listen to John's first conversation with the BASS Hybrids team, please visit: https://advancingecoag.com/podcast/podcast-extra-john-kempf-bass-hybrids-on-the-future-of-corn/

To read the University of Wisconsin research on nitrogen-fixing corn in Mexico, please visit: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2006352

To learn more about AEA's Pinion, please visit: https://advancingecoag.com/product/pinion/

To find Charles Walters' book Eco-Farm, please visit: https://bookstore.acresusa.com/products/eco-farm?srsltid=AU7gw4XfkT_GNsryakPAWEYC5avS6GxN3ikUv9nbqaG0cJXfyZIq3Y8_

To learn more about BASS Hybrids, please visit: https://www.basshybrids.com/

About John Kempf

John Kempf is the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA). A top expert in biological and regenerative farming, John founded AEA in 2006 to help fellow farmers by providing the education, tools, and strategies that will have a global effect on the food supply and those who grow it.

Through intense study and the knowledge gleaned from many industry leaders, John is building a comprehensive systems-based approach to plant nutrition – a system solidly based on the sciences of plant physiol