The name Francis Childs ring a bell??

I'm sure you all know this guy.....won a lot of awards for growing a heck of a lot of dry land corn in Iowa over the years(over 400 bu./acre one year). Did anyone on this forum hear him speak before he died, or did he publish any notes on his techniques?
P.S. I'm not interested in whether he was cheating in the contests or not. NCGA says he wasnt, and thats good enough for me

was this man from east central iowa by chance?

I dont know Iowa too well, but he farmed in Manchester.

If you search around the net a lot, you'll find some info on him including his techniques. He gave a lot of lectures over the years but he didn't give away all of his secrets. He plowed deep, put down about 44,000 seeds per acre, applied 400+ lbs of fertilizer per acre, tended his fields meticulously, used pesticides, was lucky with rains,all-in-all spent about $650 per acre just getting his crops in the ground. Planted at about 2 mph. He would set a slightly consumed can of Pepsi on a planter box and watch it. If any Pepsi spilled he would slow down. He only had about 320 acres, all corn, year after year. "You have to be willing to change." His corn roots would go down 3 feet or so. With all that, he figured his break even price was $1.68. Not bad. But he said his neighbors couldn't do it because they had thousands of acres. They were spread too thin. He could spend a lot of time with his one and only crop. He said it took him 20 years to learn how to get yields of 400 bu per acre and it would take him at least 6 years to teach someone else what he had learned. He stated that he had pulled over 500 bu/acre in some fields but they weren't the test plots.

Thats bout a hour east of Waterloo on hiway 20.

It took him a number of years to build up to those kind of yields, too. He did a lot of experimenting, kept meticulous records on what did and didn't work. He used a modified moldboard plow for his primary tillage tool that had the moldboards cut down to about half the original size. He also side-dressed fertilizer about 3 times during the growing season. He relocated to Nebraska after his divorce and placed 2 or 3 in that state's high yield contest before dying of a heart attack a year or 2 ago( if my memory is right). He did know how to grow corn!!

Before you give him alot of credit, check out who he was seeing at the time, and her job description.