[Scene opens with a shot of wind blowing through a soybean field with the Soy Masters badge overlaid on it. Guitar music plays in the background. Scene switches to Doug standing in a field, speaking to the camera.]
DOUG: Hi my name is Doug Fotheringham. I'm an agronomic service rep for Syngenta based out a south-central Manitoba.
[Scene switches to an image of a planter in the field.]
DOUG: Quite often growers are asking: should I be using a planter or an air seeder? Or what's the benefit between the two? Or if there is one?
[Scene switches back to Doug standing in the field, speaking to the camera.]
DOUG: And we know that using a planter,there are a few benefits. Planters are a little bit easier on the soybeans in terms of cracking and things like that. But seeding depth (planting depth) is more consistent with the planter and singulation as well is more consistent. And so we talk about this a lot in corns: how important singulation is. Well it's just important in soybeans. And so that's that would that would be the benefit between using an air seeder versus a planter. That being said, we plant a lot of acres with an air seeder, and we do so very successfully. And there's reasons for that. So a couple things to keep in mind when you're getting out and in the fields, whether you're using a planter or an air seeder, is soybean seed quality is one of the major ones. Every season our quality will change a little bit from our harvest conditions and so if the previous season had a really dry season, really dry harvest season, the potential for drier seed the next year is higher. And so we want to keep that in mind. So we want to be easier on that bean. We want to make sure we're slowing your fan speed down. We want to make sure that our ground speed is slower, just to reduce all the chances that there are to crack a bean. If we had a fall season where conditions were excellent and we had good moisture, and the beans that went into the bin were of good moisture, that forgives us a little bit.
[Scene switches to images of soybeans being harvested. It then shows a leafy soybean field.]
DOUG: And I think we did see that here in '17 where we had an excellent 2016 soybean harvest. Our moistures were really good and, generally speaking, our plant populations have been higher than other years because of that quality of that seed that went in the ground.
[Scene switches back to Doug standing in the field, speaking to the camera.]
DOUG: So if we can manageour planting practices appropriately we can probably start to pull down some of our target seeding rates because we know that we're gonna have a higher survivability. So just manage your speed and then manage the mechanics that are built into the piece of equipment that you're using, whether there's fans or belts or augers or whatever. We just want to make sure that we're slowing everything down to an appropriate speed to handle that soybean safely.
[Scene changes to a close-up shot of rows of young soybeans. Guitar music plays in the background. The scene switches to the Soy Masters badge and says "For more information, visit syngenta.ca or call our Customer Interaction Centre at 1-87-SYNGENTA (1-877-964-3682)".]