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Agronomy

Did The 1000 Variables Effect Your Seed?

September 13, 2011 by Rod

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Each fall there are a record number of growers who are disappointed in the results he or she gets from the crop during harvest.

Some producers will put 100% blame on the weather, others will blame themselves.  But most, of them however, will blame your varieties for the lack of performance.

So as you ride your customers’ harvesters each fall be sure to take them through a quick recap of everything the crop went through in the previous growing season.

Start with how easy or difficult the planting season was.  After all, many parts of the country had the Spring From Hell in 2011 and barely got their crop planted.

Many times your growers will have forgotten all of that as they stare at the yield monitor with disappointment or anger and think about all of the revenue they may have missed out on by not having the number of bushels they needed or wanted.

It’s your job to change the attitude and the mindset of that grower.

During your combine ride make sure you walk him/her through the Top 5 Factors To Producing A Top Crop and ask them how many they think were violated this past growing season?

None?

1 or 2?

All of them?

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Trouble Call Or Opportunity Knocking?

May 26, 2011 by Rod

Trouble Call Or Opportunity Knocking?

I got a call early one morning from a dealer who was at a customer’s place checking on a stand complaint.  The dealer had been called to look at a field planted to one of our varieties that had only about two-thirds of its intended plant population.  The dealer said that the customer had filled six boxes of his twelve row planter with our seed and the other six boxes with a competitor’s seed.  The competitor’s seed had a perfect stand while ours didn’t.  I knew right away that this was trouble.  I always told my dealers and sales reps to tell their customers to never split their planters (see 12 Reasons Why You Should Never Split Your Planter) because so many bad things can happen.  Besides, when you have a problem like this, where the twelve rows involved aren’t even planter rows, it becomes very hard to fix.

As with any spring trouble call, an immediate response is not optional.  Spring complaints must be responded to at once because they always involve customers who are feeling the frustration of not getting their crop off to the timely start they intended.  I told the dealer to take the customer for coffee and I would be there in about an hour.

When I met my dealer and his customer at the field I saw that, sure enough, every twelve alternating rows had about 2/3 the intended population, while the other twelve rows were nearly perfect.  Both the dealer and the customer had dug up dozens of seedlings in the bad rows to show me how our variety had started germinating and then stopped for some reason.  They already had the problem narrowed down to bad seed – our bad seed.

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Categories: Agronomy, Trouble Calls | Tags:

Top 5 Factors To Producing A Top Crop!

April 29, 2011 by Rod

Top 5 Factors To Producing…


Regardless of when planting takes place in your territory, it remains the most important time of the year for all seed sellers and their customers.   After all, planting season is the time of the year when both you and your customer are determining your future success.  It is also the best chance for you, the seed seller, to put yourself in a true leadership position in the grower’s mind. This is the time of the year when you will get to help growers control the most important variables that affect their level of success when producing their crop.  I call it the Top 5 Factors To Producing A Top Crop.  This spring, make sure your customers are following these Top 5 Factors and they will in fact, produce a top crop!

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Categories: Agronomy, Planting Season, Product Performance | Tags: ,

NEVER Let Your Customers Split Their Planter!!

March 13, 2011 by Rod

12 Reasons Why You Should Never Split Your Planter!

Over the years, so many of my customers have wanted to split their planters, putting one variety in half the boxes and another seed variety in the other half so they could plant two different varieties at the same time. 

That meant if he had a twelve row planter, he would put one variety in six boxes and a competitive variety in the other six boxes.  That resulted in twelve rows of each variety, alternating across the field.  So many growers think that by splitting their planters they can learn so much, almost like having their very own research plot. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, instead of learning more, growers actually distort the facts even more.

If at all possible, never allow your customers to split their planters because everything that happens to them when they do is bad. 

There are no positives that come from this kind of planting arrangement. 

Take a look:

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Categories: Agronomy, Planting Season, Product Performance | Tags: , ,