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The least expensive seed bag on your farm could be the one that ends up costing you the most. With input costs on many growers’ minds in today’s economy, return on investment (ROI) offers a useful way to think through the decisions that help get more from every acre.
What Return on Investment Means for Growers
Imagine being handed a bag of seed for free. Without the right hybrid selection and placement of that bag, and without good management and planting, it could cost more in lost margin than you saved by paying nothing for it. Less than optimal hybrid selection and placement is a common occurrence on farms, and it is one reason it is possible the highest priced seed in a lineup can still deliver the best return on investment.
Management decisions layer on top of the seed decision. It starts with planting approach, planting type, and population, runs all the way through harvest, and includes the inputs that go onto the seed or the crop along the way. ROI keeps the focus on the return a grower gets.
How Seed-Driven Crop Inputs Support ROI
Many of the newer biological and nutritional products have a differential impact on different corn hybrids and soybean varieties. A product that performs well on one hybrid may perform differently on another, so knowing which seed products give the best response to which seed driven crop inputs helps drive ROI.
Seed companies that offer both seed and seed driven crop inputs are well positioned to make those pairings. They know their seed products extremely well, and that knowledge, along with an understanding of how seed interacts with these inputs, allows the two to be matched deliberately.
When the pairing works, the benefits can show up in several places. A product that is a little less uniform or slow out of the ground can emerge better, creating a more uniform stand. Other pairings can improve crop and plant health at the end of the year. Rob-See-Co approaches the combination of seed and seed driven crop inputs this way.
The Evolution of Seed Traits and Genetics
Technology waves have been reshaping seed for decades, going back to the introduction of hybrid corn in the 1930s. Prior to the 1990s, before genetically modified (GM) traits arrived, a major focus was herbicide sensitivity, because some corn hybrids were negatively affected more than others by certain herbicides.
How GM Traits Changed Weed and Insect Control
Tolerance to glyphosate was the most notable early GM trait, and it opened a lot of doors for farmers to control weeds. Insect resistance came next, first for corn borer and then for corn rootworm. Since then the trait lineup has kept growing. Growers now have tolerance to glufosinate, along with stacks of corn rootworm and corn borer protection that cover a broader spectrum of lepidopteran species. Herbicide tolerance has expanded to include 2,4-D and FOPs in corn, and dicamba in soybeans.
What Comes Next for Traits
Iterative improvements are expected to continue. Many registrations are moving through for additional stacks with more herbicide tolerances, and disease traits may come into the mix in soybeans. In corn, new insect trait modes of action are expected, especially from a resistance management perspective. They may not always improve efficacy in sensitive populations, but they will help with the longevity of the traits. Yield and yield stability traits are also starting to come in. The regulatory landscape remains the biggest obstacle, which makes timing hard to predict.
GM traits are no longer producing such big stepwise changes. Breeding has been the mainstay of yield improvement across the industry for the last 100 years, and the next generation of technologies includes improved breeding methods such as genomic prediction and gene editing.
Gene Editing in Agriculture: A Great Tool in the Toolbox
Gene editing is often positioned as purely game changing, with talk of 10% yield improvements year over year. We see it as a great tool to have in the plant breeding toolbox. For a high value gene that has been targeted, a version of that gene can be turned off, on, up, or down, which makes gene editing useful for allele enrichment. It can also bring unique characteristics into germplasm that would otherwise take six or seven years of traditional breeding to reach.
Gene editing is aimed at high value targets, and in many crop species the specific genes are not yet known. Crops can also be improved through breeding without knowing the target at the gene level. For those reasons, gene editing may not turn out to be an end-all for agriculture, but will be an important and useful technology in crop improvement.
Why Genetic Diversity Matters
Corn carries a great deal of genetic diversity. Two inbreds from the same heterotic family can be more distantly related to each other than humans are to chimpanzees. Drawing on more breeding programs gives a portfolio a large amount of diversity to tweak and guide it going forward.
Rob-See-Co offers one example. About four and a half years ago, our portfolio came from one or a couple of germplasm pools. Today, seven breeding organizations contribute to our portfolio.
Being on multiple trait platforms can be motivated by the traits and what they bring. In many cases it is also simply a way to expand access to diverse genetics from more providers and to represent the full landscape of efforts to improve crops.
What the 2026 Season Is Showing
This section reflects conditions at the time of recording in the fall of 2026.
As harvest progresses, the crop is showing its yield potential.
Disease has dominated the discussion for the last couple of years, with less of that this year. Heat in July is expected to be the conversation this fall, and it has left a lot of tip-back in many places. This has created much variability from field to field, with some fields pushing record yield levels and others struggling with heat induced yield loss, depending on moisture, hybrid or variety, and many other soil and weather factors.
In-season investments are showing up. Fungicides and early season crop inputs helped keep the crop healthy and alive early, so it could take advantage of late moisture, and those investments are paying off in late season plant health. Kernel depth is proving to be important this year in establishing top end yield potential.
Fall is also the most influential time of year, for seed companies and farmers alike, in determining what will be sold or purchased for next year. Performance results, especially for new products, and an understanding of what influenced the year will guide decisions heading into 2027 planting.
ROI Is a Year-Round Effort
A crop is planted over about four weeks in the spring and harvested over about four weeks in the fall, and there is only so much that can be done in between to alter the yield outcome. Whether on the farm or the sales side, there are no breaks, only a year-long set of decisions. Improving ROI evaluating year-round, no matter the goal.
Listen to the Podcast
This topic kicks off a new series on ROI from the Rob-See-Co Field Ready Podcast, which focuses on the decisions that help get more from every acre. In the first episode, CTO Dr. Ben Ford welcomes CEO Dr. Jim Robinson to discuss how Rob-See-Co approaches traits, crop inputs, and expertise to help growers maximize return on the farm.
Watch the episode on YouTube, or search for the Rob-See-Co Field Ready Podcast on your preferred podcast platform. A new episode airs on the first of every month, with each segment focused on improving growers’ return on investment.
