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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