I was trained in mainstream agronomy and that is the way my brother and I manage our farm. We make our seed selections based on recommendations from a dealer. We apply P and K based on soil tests. We apply N based on soil availability and yield. We select pesticides based weeds, insect and disease. And we no-till to save soil and money and conserve water.

And by following these conventional, mainstream tactics I have the privilege of harvesting 100 to 150 bushel corn, depending on the weather in eastern Nebraska. Really this is not to exciting and not a way to get rich farming and I have not been able to make the "big leap" forward.

And as a practicing agronomist in industry and now in the media, I also write about all the mainstream agronomy stuff. I write about the stuff I learned in college, what universities continue to talk about and what industry is doing.

But there are other, non conventional ways of doing things that I barely understand. I am not talking about organic farming or low input farm. I am referring to some of the innovative, out of the box things that top growers like Kip Cullers, Keith Schlapkohl, Ray Rawson, Bill Darrington, Francis Childs and others are doing. These are the guys whose on farm yields are way beyond the local county or state average. They are obviously doing something right and they often want to talk about it.

Traditional conventional agronomists, university experts and farmers usually discredit these tactics as not valid, scientifically unproven and uneconomical. Terms like snake oil and go go juice are bantered around loosely.

I am sure that some of these tactics and/or products fall into this category and are promoted by unscrupulous salesman. So buyers have to be cautious.

However you cannot deny the value of getter 140 bushel soybeans or 300 plus bushel corn and the methods or systems these growers use to get there.

As I talked with these top growers and they start talking about some of their practices and products, I often get lost in the conversation because I do not have the knowledge and I fall back on my conventional agronomic training. But I am also trying to maintain an open mind on some of these non conventional approaches and sorting out what works and doesn't work and hopefully write about it with an open mind.

All of these top growers rely on mainstream agronomy to build their foundation. But they go beyond that. They are trying new products and approaches to bump their crop yield and doing it successfully and opening new doors for the rest of us.

Mainstream agronomy is good since it is the foundation for every good crop production program. But there are also valid non-conventional tactics that can move a farmer from getting only an average yield and staying on trendline to being one of the top producers in their counties.

I hope to explore some of these approaches this winter and write about them. I will probably even find a few that we can adopt on our family farm.

Mainstream is good but many unconventional approaches have merit even though many experts discount their value. You have to look, listen and try it yourself to know for sure.