 Now our crop is finally starting to exert itself. It's within a week of maximum tillering, so it's growing quite strongly now and a lot of those gaps that we've had to live with for several weeks are finally starting to fill in, so we're feeling better. This week we're going to take the opportunity to talk about what I would call the biotic influences on the crop and making an assessment of it. So that's how animals, plants, funguses and viruses, how they're interacting with the crop, both beneficial and not beneficial. And I have with me here Nancy Castillo, who is a specialist in assessing rice crops for the biotic influences and the level of injury that's coming from it. And Nancy and I will step through the process of assessing the rice crop for insects, for weeds and diseases, both from viruses and funguses. So here we go. So next week what we intend to do is that we will be collecting data on injuries caused by animal pests. Animal pests refer to insect pests, snails and rats. And then we will be also assessing injuries caused by diseases, viral diseases, bacterial diseases and fungal diseases. And then we will be also assessing injuries caused by weeds. This is direct seeded rice. So we have here a quadrat, what we call as a, we consider some kind of a magic weapon. So this is equivalent to one-heeled and transplanted rice. So we would actually be sampling for diseases and insect injuries. We will be using 10 quadrats. We will be sampling from 10 quadrats. And then we would be also taking, we will be sampling weeds from three areas. Each area would be about one meter by one meter. So we would be assessing weeds relative to the height of the canopy. And we will be recording the type of weeds that we will find next week. So we have a sweep net. Yes, this is a sweep net. We use this for counting the flying insects. In this case, mainly green leaf hoppers. Green leaf hopper is the vector of tungro. For the tapping method, we have this small pan here with water, it has little detergent. And we use it for counting the sucking insects. Like plant hoppers, white plant hoppers, brown plant hoppers. And then other, in the surveys, we do in other parts of the Philippines, we also catch rice bugs. Black bugs rather. So with these magic weapons, next week when the crop reaches the stage of maximum tillering, you'll make an assessment according to our data sheet. And then again, in the reproductive stage, in the grain filling and mature stage, we'll make another assessment. That should give us a good idea of what biological things have done both for and against our rice crop. As the crop gets into maximum tillering, it's really doing its thing. The photosynthetic engine is really starting to power the rice crop along. And unfortunately, Akim, Ai and the local rodents are deepening our relationship and they've emerged and are damaging the crop and you. So whilst most of the field is filling in nicely, we're still getting gaps in the crop and those gaps do soon to be multiplying. We're doing our best to control the rats around the field at the moment as per our regular program here at Erie. These holes are irritating to say the least. So we'll go out and have a look at one of them. It's complete damage. Eating the rice off at the ground completely killed the rice plant and rendered an area somewhere between half a square meter and a full square meter completely bare, or pretty well bare. They're quite selective. They didn't even eat the weeds, which was a bit annoying. I can now appreciate how rodents can completely decimate a crop. Grant described to me the typical pattern where they'll completely destroy the inside of a field and leave the borders intact, which is a good deceptive way to do your work. I'm hoping we can stop the emergence of these new bare areas from rats. We'll just have to work our hardest and do our best.