[Scene opens with a shot of soybeans with the text "Causes of Harvest Loss" overlaid on top. The scene changes to a shot of Bryce in a room beside a lamp.]
BRYCE: I'm Bryce Rampton, soybean product development agronomist for Western Canada. It's always so funny... we spend so much time all year getting the crop in, making sure we're establishing a good stand, controlling weeds, controlling other pests throughout the season, managing different weather events, and then we get to harvest and we're in such a hurry to get everything done that we're not really paying attention to what we're leaving behind. So harvest loss is a big issue. I think a lot of the times we don't always know what our harvest loss is.
[Scene switches to a closeup shot of pods that have shattered with beans on the ground.]
BRYCE: A big part of managing that loss is, first, understanding just how much we are losing.
[Scene switches back to Bryce.]
BRYCE: So harvest management... we always think it's loss out of the combine. But really, managing a good crop and a good harvest starts at the very beginning. It almost starts at planting. On a soybean plant, the first node off the ground (so the cotyledon node and sometimes a unifoliate node) is really the lowest point that a pod can form on the plant. So any strategy that we can incorporate that can lift that off the ground (planting into warmer soil and better conditions, maintaining high populations so plants help themselves push out of the ground, and extend that high length above ground) really helps getting the header underneath that first node. Another strategy is managing any rocks or clumps of mud or dirt that we have in the field, any trash, with a roller. So making sure that field is a level surface, pushing any other material down, so that we can run that header right along the ground. Reducing our loss really starts even before we get the combine in the field. So when a soybean plant reaches R8 (so that 95% brown pod maturity) we've got about a week to ten days before we realistically need to get out there in the field and before it's ready to go. So I think the risk is sometimes, you know in Western Canada, we had a lot of different crops. We've got wheats, we got canola, we got other pulses. And oftentimes we can be really busy getting all those crops off and we're leaving the beans out there in the field and we're saying, "Well they're not too bad for shatter they'll be okay," and that's true. Soybeans are a little bit less susceptible to shatter, but there is varietal differences between that so we want to be picking a variety that is good for shatter. But what happens that when they're out there and they dry down and then we get a rainfall? We get a rain, the seeds do swell inside those pods, and then they dry down again.
[Scene switches to a closeup shot of pods that have shattered with beans on the ground.]
BRYCE: If you get a couple of those rain cycles, those swell seeds can pop open the pods and we see that shattering loss. So it is really important to get the out there in a timely fashion to get the crop off. 
[Scene switches back to Bryce.]
BRYCE: The second aspect is when we actually do get the combine out into the field. So we've got a couple of different points that we can lose yield from field loss when we're combining. So one is at the header and we call that gathering loss.
[Scene quickly shows an image of seeds on the ground and an image of a tape measure showing pods left low to the ground within 6 inches.]
BRYCE: So that can happen from either shattering on the plants (the seeds popping out of the pods onto the ground). It can happen from stubble loss (so we're cutting too high off the ground, we're leaving pods on the plant lower down).
[Scene switches back to Bryce.]
BRYCE: It can happen from what we call loose stalks, so this is when the knife will actually cut the plants but the plant doesn't feed into the header and it falls forward off of the table onto the ground.
[Scene switches to a closeup shot of pods that have shattered with beans on the ground.]
And then the last one is what we call lodge stalks, so that's actually when the knife doesn't cut the plant fully and it just gets pushed over underneath the head and not onto the table. 
[Scene switches back to Bryce.]
BRYCE: So actually that accounts for about 80% of what we usually see of total harvest loss in a lot of different cases, so it's really important to understand and manage that. The last aspect is really once it does make it through the combine: we have our threshing/separating loss associated with that. So that's our final point and that's the last little bit that we get. So every combine has a manual in different aspects of managing that and how to set that accordingly, so another thing to watch for and understand of course. Alright, so one consideration we need to make and we're assessing loss is just how fast we're traveling.
[Scene switches to a cut field of soybeans.]
BRYCE: Speed can have a big effect on how much loss we see.
[Scene switches back to Bryce.]
BRYCE: So when you're analyzing your losses and you notice that there are some stubble loss, there are some pods still attached to the plants underneath after we've gone through, but it varies a lot through the field - that's one thing that can happen with speed. Even when we're really confident that we are cutting as low as possible, when we go a little bit faster you start to see header bounce, start to see side-to-side fluctuation in height that can lead to higher levels of that stubble loss. And then when you're cutting into the middle of the plant in those cases, you are getting some shatter. So that's one thing to consider. The other thing is to watch if your knife is actually keeping up with the cutting. Sometimes when we go faster, we can start to see a lot more lodged plants underneath getting pushed down by the header. In those cases where we do lose entire plants to that, that's where and we can start to see extremely high levels of loss. So to put it all together, we want to make sure that we're thinking about harvest even at planting, we're getting out there in a timely fashion when our crop is ready to go, and we're going through the proper methods to assess our overall loss while we're combining in the field.
[Scene changes to a white screen that says "For more information, visit Syngenta.ca, contact our Customer Interaction Centre at 1-877-964-3682 or follow @SyngentaCanada on Twitter."]