Agronomic Trait Scores Sorting Tool

Sorting Tool

The “Agronomic Trait Scores Sorting Tool” is the best we could come up with to help you compare hybrids across companies/brands for “goodness of fit” measured against your own selection criteria. Although it is far from perfect, it probably will prove to be quite a bit more helpful than the tools that have been available to you heretofore.

Here are the basic concepts behind what we have done in the construction of this tool: We simply took the range of scores that each company assigns to their hybrids for the agronomic traits that they’ve disclosed ratings for, and then converted them to a common scale. The scale we’ve chosen to utilize is 0 to 4. We’ve selected this scale for 2 reasons: no seed company (that we’re aware of) is currently using it (so it won’t look like we have bias for or against any particular company), and because it is a scale we are all familiar with: the Grade Point Average used in schools. This also allowed us to ascribe letter grades to each of the hybrids for “goodness of fit” – kind of a fun and different way of looking at things.

Here’s a simple explanation of how the conversions were made: Regardless of scale used, the highest score that a seed company assigned to any hybrid for a particular trait was converted to a “4”, and the lowest score assigned for that same trait was converted to a “0” -- with all the intermittent scores likewise being converted proportionately to a rating somewhere between 4 and 0.

There are a couple notable exceptions to this pattern, however. And it is here that one of my (Steven Dvorak’s) own personal pet peeves comes most noticeably into play. Whenever I have personally rated hybrids or varieties for the various agronomic characteristics, I have always been able to sort the entire lineup from strongest to weakest for any given trait. 50 different hybrids? – then 50 different scores. In my humble opinion, every company should be savvy enough to be able to show us some distinguishable and meaningful spread between hybrids for any particular trait beyond just 2 or 3 or 4 rating units. If a company claims to rate their hybrids from 0 to 9 with 9 being best, then pray tell – why in the world would they restrict themselves to only using 7’s, 8’s and 9’s? So… here is how I chose to deal with this frustration: if a company only published a spread of 2 units for a given trait, then the highest score was converted to a “3” and the lowest to a “2”; 3 unit spread? – then the highest score became a “3”, the middle one to a “2”, and the lowest to a “1”. If they showed a spread of 4 units, then the highest became a “3.5”, the next a “2.5”, the next a “1.5”, and the last a “0.5”. It is only for the companies and traits where a spread of 5 or more units were published where the highest score became a “4” and the lowest a “0” with all the rest falling out proportionately in between.

Seed company employees will tell you that you cannot compare their company’s rating system to another’s. And largely, this is true. When you do something similar to what we have done with this tool, you make 1 critical assumption: every company’s best for any given trait is roughly the same as any other company’s best; and any company’s worst is very similarly as bad as any other’s worst. If you can live with this assumption, then you should be able to find this tool to be very useful. If not, you still can use this tool with great confidence in weighting and sorting hybrids within single brands (companies).

Set-up Guidelines

Identify which agronomic traits are most important to you.

Divide 100 points between those identified important traits, weighted in proportion to the level of their importance to you (i.e. allocate more points to the more important traits, and fewer to the less important).

Allocating more or fewer than 100 points will still sort hybrids in proportion to the number of points that you did allocate (i.e. it will still identify those with best “goodness of fit” based on your criteria), but the determination of the final “letter grade” assessments will then not be calculated properly.

Although plant height may be important to you, I would suggest not weighting it if you are looking for short hybrids -- because it will then work opposite of your intentions for that trait as a “4” represents a “tall” hybrid and a “0” represents one categorized as “short”. In this case, do not provide any weighting for “plant height”, and then just visually scan that trait column after the sort in order to avoid those that you would consider to be excessively tall for your preferences.

You also might not want to enter a weighting for “green-snap”. If you are corn farmer in the Dakotas or Nebraska, this certainly will be an important trait for you to consider. But as most companies will not market hybrids that represent excessive risk for this trait in this geography, it might be more productive for you to sort based upon other criteria first, and then just scan the green-snap column after the sort for any with low scores for this trait that you would want to avoid.

There most likely will be other agronomic traits or positioning statements important to you that are not included in this table. That is because not enough seed companies report ratings for those traits of concern. If there are missing values for particular hybrids and traits, that is because the providing seed company did not publish a rating for that particular hybrid and trait.

Like our other tools, this “Agronomic Trait Scores Sorting Tool” is just that – another tool. By itself it is incomplete, imperfect and insufficient. Consider its findings for what they’re worth. Please also consult tech sheets and positioning statements provided by seed companies and their representatives in order to more confidently fine-tune your hybrid placement decisions.

Video Demo - Tool #2

Creator Steven Dvorak demonstrates the functions and results of Tool #2 - Agronomic Trait Scores Sorting Tool. View the video tutorial on how this tool works.

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