[Scene opens with a shot of young soybean rows with the Soy Masters badge overlaid on it. Drum and guitar music plays in the background. Scene switches to Doug standing in a hotel lobby, speaking to the camera.]
DOUG: Hi, my name is Doug Fotheringham. I'm an agronomic service rep for Syngenta based out of Manitoba. Today I'm attending a Soy Masters event.
[Scene switches to show Doug giving a presentation at a podium.]
DOUG: And what Soy Masters is, is a new platform for Syngenta to provide new tips and tricks to soybean growers in Western Canada to achieve higher yields.
[Scene switches back to Doug in the lobby, speaking to the camera.]
DOUG: Today we're gonna talk about stand establishment. Figuring out our stand establishment is one of the key drivers for achieving our yield goal. So when we look at figuring out our plant populations, there's a few different methods and ways to do that.
[Doug holds up two hula hoops.]
DOUG: There's the hula hoop method is one. So here I have a 28 and a quarter inch hula hoop. What we would do is we would go out to our field, we would throw this around in the field, count the plants inside the hula hoop, multiply that number by 10,000 that gives us our plant per acre. It's an effective method but we as what we've also found some more efficient and accurate ways of doing it.
[Scene quickly switches to show fields of soybeans and then goes back to Doug.]
DOUG: And so that's the row count method. When we
look at the differences between row counts and using the hula hoop, we would use the row count when we know that we have a grower that's either using a planter or a disc-type opener where we know we can figure out where our rows are.
[Scene quickly switches to show fields of soybeans and then goes back to Doug.]
DOUG: If we're working with a grower that is using more of a sweep-type opener and it's more difficult to find where those rows are in the field, that's when the hula hoop comes in. And it's a very efficient way of doing it when we're working with growers with that type of equipment. My colleague, Eric Richter, who's been using the row count method for a number of years now is going to show you how to do that and use that method effectively.
[Scene switches to Eric standing in a field by a flag with a tape measure in his hand.]
ERIC: So what I'd like to do first is just show this technique to you here. We've got a tape measure and what we're going to do - I have placed a flag here on the row, these are in 30-inch rows. It doesn't matter, we could be in 15, 7.5, 10-inch rows, and we can very quickly do the same thing here. But we'll measure off 17 and a half feet starting right here at this flag, and we'll go down the row and I'll put a flag in at the other end at 17 and a half feet.
[Scene switches to Eric at the second flag in the field.]
ERIC: So as I was working towards here now, we've got that 17 and a half foot measurement in the field here. Our first flag here. 17.5 feet into the row we've got the other flag. And as I say, all we're simply doing now (and this will be only done once this way with the flags, after this we'll just be doing the heel to toe and our counts) but we're simply going to count the number of boots between flag one and flag two.
[Scene shows Eric counting his heel-to-toe steps between the flags.]
ERIC: And the objective here is, once we've got to the end and we've got that magic number, whether you're 7.5, 9 or a 13 foot boot size, you know exactly how many that is for that 17 and half feet. And for myself, I'm pretty lucky. I'm just a tad under 12 inches and we've got seventeen and a half boot lengths and we got it right on. That magic number then gives us the 1/1000 of an acre in the 30 inch row.
[Scene quickly switches to show close-ups of soybeans and then goes back to Eric in the field.]
ERIC: So in 30 inch rows, we now simply do our counts by row. If it's 15, again we're counting the plants in that 17.5 feet, but we would multiply by two. If it's seven and a half, we can still count in the row but we're multiplying by four to get our plant count in 1000s per acre. That's what we're actually working towards. So whether it's in a really poor part of the field, average part, or even the good parts of the field, very quickly we can go in, we can do our counts very accurately, very quickly. And the neat thing about this method is we can do multiple rows. We've got the two flags and we can count to our left and we can count to the right until our heart is content. And we've got multiple stand counts now. And that's important whether your using a row unit planter or a drill. This allows us to pick up any anomalies, any differences or discrepancies, between the rows. The hoop doesn't allow us to do that.
[Scene switches back to Doug in the hotel lobby, speaking to the camera.]
DOUG: Those were great tips from Eric. As you can see, the row count method is a very efficient, accurate way of calculating plant populations. For more information on how to calculate your plant populations based on different row spacings, visit our Soy Masters website. We'll have a resource there that you can refer to to help you make those calculations. Thanks and stay tuned. There's more to come.
[Scene changes to a shot of rows of soybeans blowing in the wind. 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)".]