[Scene opens with a shot of young soybean rows 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 of south-central Manitoba.
[Scene switches to a wide shot of a soybean field, then switches back to Doug in the field.]
DOUG: When looking at stand assessments, it's not only important knowing what you have in your crop for this year, but it's also extremely important for looking at next year's crop. And how do I improve on what my stand actually is? There's many cases where we're actually putting too much seed down, which is a cost. There's lots of cases where we're not putting down enough, and so our stand is too thin. But also, by doing these assessments, it gives us a good look at either our air seeder or planter. Is it working properly from wing to wing, tip to tip? Is there any issues within that that rig that we can fix this year for next year? And so there's a few methods to do stand assessment.
[Scene switches to show rows of young soybean plants blowing in the wind, then switches back to Doug in the field.]
DOUG: The Manitoba pulse growers has a really neat app on their website that I would encourage you to use. It's very user friendly, it's quick and easy, so you can go ahead and check that out. There's the hula hoop method: a twenty eight and a quarter inch hula hoop. We can throw that and multiply that by a thousand. That gives us roughly our numbers like plants per acre. A method I like to use for stand assessments is the row method. And so it's really easy and it's very quick. So all we need to do is draw a line in the dirt, and I heel-to-toe seventeen and a half feet. So what we want to do is count our number of plants in seventeen and a half feet no matter what row spacing we're using. So if I'm on a 30-inch row spacing, for example, I count my number of plants in seventeen and a half feet, multiply that by 1000, and that gives our gives us our plants per acre. If we're on a 22-inch row, count your number of plants, multiply that by 1350, gives you your plans per acre. If you're on a 20-inch row, multiply that by 1300. If you're on a 15-inch row you multiply that by 2,000. If you're on a 10-inch row, multiply that by 3,000. If you're on a 7.5-inch row, multiply that by 4,000. That all gives you your plants per acre and you can count multiple rows while you're doing it. So after you draw that line, you can count along, count here, count there, move to a different spot in the field count there. If your numbers are all fairly similar, you know that you've got a pretty good rough idea of what your plants per acre are and you're good to go. It's best to do that method when you're at that first/second trifoliate because it's really easy to count your number of plants. We're a little further into the season here now, so it's a little more difficult to count. And sometimes we get busy and we forget to do so. So another another good time to do it is actually in the fall after we've harvested, and we can easily count our sticks in the ground once the combines gone through. And it's still useful for our next year when we're deciding our plant populations. Both the hula-hoop method and the in-the-row method both worked very well. I just I like to use the row method because it's fairly quick, you can count multiple rows at one time, you don't have to carry anything with you, it's very quick mental math, and it's a very good quick assessment on what you're looking at.
[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)".]