Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
425B Smyth Hall Mail Code 0403
Blacksburg, Virginia 24061
540/231-4490 FAX: 540/231-3075
egrucker@vt.edu
January 6, 2015
Dear Seed Producer:
Test your corn hybrids in the 2015 Virginia Tech Corn Silage Testing Program. We will test hybrids in the
Southwest/Mountain area, in the Shenandoah Valley area, in the Southern Piedmont area at Blackstone, and in the
Northern Piedmont area. You may select any location at a cost of $175 per hybrid per location, or you may select
all four locations for a reduced rate of $600 per hybrid. We will plant four replications at each site using a
Wintersteiger PlotKing 2600 planter. We will harvest plots and do quality testing in-house. We plan to use the
Milk2006 system (as we did in 2014) to simplify quality comparisons between corn silage samples. Complete
results from 2014 have been posted to the VCE public website. The web address is
http://www.pubs.ext.vt.edu/CSES/CSES-106/CSES-106. (All previous publications may be found on the web at
http://www.sites.ext.vt.edu/newsletter-archive/.)
Please return the entry form as soon as possible with a deadline of Friday, February 13. One half pound of
seed per entry per location should be sent to me by Friday, March 20. Failure to meet these deadlines
may result in entries being omitted from the tests. Seed should arrive treated with the same
treatments as would be applied for marketing purposes in our region. Please make sure your entry form has seed
treatments, genetic trait package using numeric indicators found in column 1 of the Handy Bt Trait Table (thanks to
Chris DiFonzo, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI and Eileen Cullen, University of Wisconsin, Madison,
WI), and maturities indicated. Please advise us of any changes of address, company names or contact people. Also,
please note on the entry form if an experimental hybrid from 2014 has been assigned a commercial designation for
2015. This information is necessary when we prepare two and three year averages.
Packaging hints (and please pass this information on to whomever is packaging your seed!): send only the
amount of seed requested; ziplocs are great but don’t use staples; package all locations together (one bag per
hybrid); ship to my attention at 1008 Old Mill Rd Blacksburg VA 24061. Make checks payable to "Virginia Tech
Corn Silage Testing" and mail to the address below. If you have any suggestions for improving the test or questions
concerning the test, please feel free to contact me at (540) 231-4490 or FAX # (540) 231-3075. I may also be
reached via email at egrucker@vt.edu.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Hokanson
Coordinator, Grain Crops Variety Testing
Department of Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences
425B Smyth Hall Virginia Tech Mail Code 0403
Blacksburg, VA 24061
telephone (540) 231-4490
fax (540) 231-3075
e-mail egrucker@vt.edu
Enc.
cc: H. Behl
P. Blevins
S. Gulick
M. Yancey
C. Teutsch
W. Thomason