Speaker 1: At planting, we need to make sure that we have a good soil to seed contact with soil moisture. In this season, it’s been an issue of what soil depth, seeding depth that we’re talking about to get to moisture. A lot of cases where we would just be seeding at a typical inch, inch and a half, there is no soil moisture or there’s variable soil moisture. In a field like this, it’s pretty common with a bean planted in the drought stressed period of middle of May.
This could certainly happen if beans were planted in late April, if the drought stress occurred that early. In this particular case and in most of the fields that are spotty, [inaudible 00:00:47] like this, it’s due to the seeding in the middle of May, which typically is fine, but again, we had water stress early and the soil moisture levels were quite variable across the field.
You look behind me, there’s pockets of this field that look good in terms of overall growth and development. They’ve got good seedling establishment. Whereas others, if you kind of go to that hillside, soil moisture was certainly lacking at that point, and [inaudible 00:01:15] establishment also was lacking. As you look at a field like this or one that’s tilled or no tilled, it was really more about an issue of, where is the soil moisture and where are you placing the seed?
In this particular case, the plantings in the middle of May tend to be struggling more than those that were planted two or three weeks earlier, where we had adequate moisture to get the plant off, get the roots growing, and get the roots growing down.