Photo by Tom Campbell

From planting to picking, this black and gold book has helped countless farmers answer the corn and soybean questions that crop up each year. The book was produced by the winners of the 2008 Purdue Agriculture Team Award.

As books go, it will never be reviewed by the New York Times. It probably won’t be found on the best-sellers table at your Barnes & Noble bookstore. But the numbers don’t lie.

Ask a Midwest grain farmer, and he’ll tell you the Corn & Soybean Field Guide is the biggest little book out there.

“We sold 52,000 copies of the book in 2007, and I thought that was a total anomaly,” says Corey Gerber, a Purdue agronomist and director of the Purdue Crop Diagnostic Training and Research Center.

“I said, ‘We’ll never hit that number again.’ But here we are in 2008 and we’ve already sold over 70,000 copies.”

Annual sales during the first 15 years that the guide was published averaged fewer than 8,000. But when the center partnered with the Department of Agricultural Communication and upgraded the field guide, sales took off.

The success of the six-inch, 305-page pocket book is just one of the reasons that Purdue Agriculture presented the 2008 Team Award to the interdisciplinary group of specialists who cooperate to present workshops at the Crop Diagnostic Training and Research Center and to produce the book.

Primary distribution of the book is through agricultural seed, chemical or equipment companies, who put their own customized cover on the publication. This year, 67 different cover designs were ordered.

“We’re ecstatic over the success of the publication. It has very much been a surprise to everyone on the team,” Gerber says. “We’ve tried to make it a top-notch publication that is easy to use and that people want to use, and then we’ve tried to market it. But we never anticipated the success it has achieved.”

It was originally printed just to help Indiana farmers, but people all over the country, and all over the world, are finding it just as useful.

About 8,000 copies have been distributed in Canada this year. Gerber says the publication is selling well in New Zealand, and he hopes to have the book available to European markets in the near future.

“People in other states, or from around the world, contact us and say, ‘We have nothing like this available in our area; your information is terrific.’ It’s very rewarding to know that we have impacted farmers from around the world and that they find the publication useful.”

But the center is more than just the book. Founded in 1986, the diagnostic center is recognized across the country for its hands-on approach to teaching the art and science of diagnosing and dealing with crop problems.

Based at the Purdue Agronomy Center for Research and Education just north of campus, the diagnostic center is an outdoor classroom with field demonstration plots for use during training workshops and by Purdue Agriculture students. The center serves farmers, Extension educators, agronomists, crop consultants and professionals in the seed, fertilizer and agricultural chemical industries.