JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (DTN) -- While record-breaking performances received overwhelming fanfare at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games this summer, another record was quietly being broken in the red clay soil of southwest Georgia.
For the second consecutive year, Georgia farmer Alex Harrell set a new world record for soybean production. On Tuesday, Aug. 13, he harvested a 2.5757-acre plot of irrigated soybeans averaging 218.2856 bushels per acre (bpa), eclipsing the record he set last year by more than 11 bpa.
Wes Porter, an associate professor with the University of Georgia Extension, confirmed to DTN that the harvest of Harrell's contest entry was personally witnessed by Chelsea Lopez, an agriculture and natural resources agent with the Sumter County Extension office. The entry was weighed on certified scales and averaged 12.5% moisture.
"We changed up a lot because we wanted to see if we could repeat what we did last year in a different environment," Harrell told DTN by phone. "We were in a different soil type on the opposite end of the county. We changed genetic traits. We changed herbicide traits."
In 2023, Harrell's soybean plot yielded 206.7997 bpa, making him the first soybean grower to exceed 200 bpa. The previous record was 190.23 bpa, set by Randy Dowdy of Valdosta, Georgia, in 2019. Dowdy had previously harvested soybeans yielding 171 bpa in 2016, which topped the 160.6 bpa record set by Kip Cullers of Purdy, Missouri, in 2010.
