This article is presented for consideration by private industry and institutional soybean breeders who develop, release, and promote new varieties, and by coordinators of university soybean variety trials who present results from those trials. This article provides supporting evidence (in a linked article) for an issue that I believe warrants attention.

The Mississippi Soybean Promotion Board has a website, www.mssoy.org, that has a wealth of current information about soybean production. One of the website items that we are continually upgrading is the variety selection tool. Each year, we add additional functionality to this tool, and attempt to make it more user-friendly.

One of the requirements for this tool to work properly is for the name of each variety in all potential data sources to be recorded or written exactly as designated by the variety originator. Click here for a more detailed presentation on this subject that contains examples of inconsistencies in variety names among the Midsouth states’ official variety trial results. As you will see, inconsistencies do exist.

The solution to this dilemma is for each variety trial coordinator and originating company representative to use the exact name or designation for each variety as that used by the originating seed company or institution. This consistency in variety name use will be very helpful to us and all of our partners who have the same criteria for building data sets.

Again, click on the above link for a thorough presentation on this subject.

Composed by Larry G. Heatherly, Jan. 2015, larryheatherly@bellsouth.net