Are uniform stands important and do late emerging plants contribute to yield?
Growers worried about the poor stands and uneven emergence last year and rightly so because cornfields are not as pretty when plants are different heights with gaps between plants and not growing uniformly. I would also prefer to see uniformly emerged plants is every field because each plant has an equal chance at competition for water, nutrients, and light. So how important is this? Results from a study to delay emergence of various portions of the plants are given in Table 2. When 25% of the stand (full stand was 30000 plants per acre) was missing, the yield was 90% of potential or 10% of the yield was lost. When the stand was full (30000ppa) but 25% emerged 10 days later than the rest of the stand, yield was reduced only 6%, so the late emerging plants contributed 4% to yield. The yield contribution was not equal to the other plants (25% of the plants only produced 4% of the yield), but they did contribute as long as the delay in emergence was not too long. When emergence was delaye
