[Scene opens with a shot of soybeans with the text "Top 3 Problems in Manitoba: 2018 Season" overlaid on top. Happy electronic music plays in the background and fades out as 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. In any given year we really see a different spectrum of issues, right? Just depending on what's going on... we get different weather, we get different heat patterns, so that causes different problems to arise. So 2018 is no different. I think right off the beginning, 2017 we had a really dry fall. And in Western Canada, we produce a lot of our own seed in the region, so that really drove a lot of dry seed lots. So when soybean seed gets a little bit drier, it becomes a little bit more susceptible to seed coat damage. So that seed coat is really in charge of regulating the inhibition of moisture into that seed. So actually, if it has a crack or is damaged in any sense, it actually imbibes moisture too fast. And what that causes is that imbibitional chilling where it'll either swell up and not not grow into a viable plant or it'll be stunted. So it can come have some really huge effects on our overall emergence as well as just our early season vigour. In 2017 we had a pretty severe drought in a lot of areas in Western Canada and that has kind of continued into 2018 as well. We saw a lot lower overall rainfall than what we would typically expect on average, so that really affects soybeans in a lot of different ways. Soybeans do require a little bit more moisture than canola and wheat, but it's really more sensitive to what time it occurs. So early on in the year, soybeans actually don't really require a whole lot of moisture to grow. We need some moisture to have a good level of nodulation on the plants to drive nitrogen fixation. But really when we really need moisture is when we start to go reproductive so at that R1 stage, or just before that when the plant starts to get a little bit more biomass, needs a little bit more moisture. But to go through those reproductive processes, we need a lot more moisture so that can be anywhere from 0.2 to 0.3 inches of rain a day. So when you think about the year that we had, we really didn't get any appreciable rainfall in a lot of cases throughout the entire summer, so that caused some flower abortion. Sometimes when we did get those flowers turning turn to pods, we had pod abortion. And then we had smaller seed size in the fall. So overall effecting yield. So one problem that we haven't necessarily seen a lot in Western Canada is green seed in soybeans. So green lock-in in soybeans. So what happened this year is, with that really dry fall, there's an enzyme in soybeans (and it happens in other plants as well) which the green chlorophyll in plants (that's the green material that we see in plants) as a plant's senescencing there's an enzyme (chlorophylase is the enzyme) that degrades that chlorophyll. So to turn it from its green color into its senescence color and in soybeans that's whatever pubescence it has. So what happened is, as it got really dry, the plants dried down too fast and the the enzyme didn't have enough time to degrade all that chlorophyll. So it leaves us with that green on the seed. And there's two different kinds - it can have a green exterior on the seed, which you know if we leave it on the field that can actually come down a little bit to a more natural colour. But the ones that we really had a lot in this year and that was a problem is when we get that green chlorophyll through out the center and that can count as overall total dockage when we hauled it to the elevators. So there is some varietal differences in green seed levels that we did see this year, but I think the overall strategy is to pick a variety that's maybe a little bit less suceptible but also to be growing the correct maturity for our adapted zone. Sometimes some of these later-maturing varieties that were grown in too cool of a zone for it (it was too green when we got into these late season conditions) and caused a lot higher green seed percentages in those cases. So like I said, 2018 brought us maybe a bit drier seed than we like on average, a lot less summer rainfall, and some green seed concerns towards the end of the fall. You know, every year we don't get the same thing, so I'm looking forward to seeing what 2019 brings.
[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."]