Maize Yield and Planting Date Relationship: A Synthesis-Analysis for US High-Yielding Contest-Winner and Field Research Data

For maize (Zea mays L.), early planting date could be of advantage to high yields but a review of planting date effect on high-yielding data is not yet available. Following this rationale, a synthesis-analysis was conducted from the farmer annual maize contest-winner data (n = 16171 data points; 2011-2016 period); cordially provided by the National Corn Growers Association and a scientific literature dataset collected from research publications since the last three decades. The main objectives of this study were to: (i) identify spatial yield variability within the high-yielding maize dataset; (ii) understand the impacts of planting date on yield variability; (iii) explore the effect of management practices on maize yield-planting date relationship, and (iv) utilize the yield-planting date dataset collected via farmer contest-winner as a benchmarking data to be compared to the compendium of scientific literature available for yield-planting date relationship for the primary US maize producing regions. Major findings of this study are: (i) significant correlation between planting date and latitude, (ii) maize yield was maximized when planting window was 89-106 day of the year (DOY) for the 30-35°N, 107-118 DOY for the 35-40°N, <119 DOY for 40-45°N, and <129 DOY for 45-50°N, and (iii) both, yield contest and literature datasets portrayed that planting date becomes a more relevant factor when planting late, presenting a relatively smaller planting window in high-compared to low-latitudes.