One of the questions Hedrick gets asked about 2022 most often is, ‘How did you choose the hybrid?’
“It started with a bunch of arguments between me and Clif,” he laughed. “We were at our commodity conference last year and I said, ‘Clif, we have this farm and the ground is really special. We’ve pushed it as hard as we can and we want to put a racehorse hybrid on it again this year to see how much further we can push it.”
“We do a lot of field walking. As a farmer, the visual indicators of getting out in the field – seeing the crop conditions, weed pressure, disease pressure – really being able to see that with your own eyes, that is so valuable. Doing your own agronomy work, versus having standard scouting done by other people, helps us make better management decisions and see a higher return on investment. That’s why we walk so many fields.”
The 2022 North Carolina Corn Yield Contest Dryland Division winner set what many believe to be a world-record dryland yield with 459.51 bushels per acre in Catawba County, North Carolina. A first-generation farmer, Hedrick has gone from fighting fires to lining up speaking engagements with agricultural audiences around the world over the last decade.
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