 It's one week after planting now and I'm back at the field here. Lee has gone off to the beach. I've just come back from the beach, so for a few days nobody was watching the crop. But it's now about a week after planting and it's the time to apply the first dose of fertilizer because we didn't apply a pre-plant application. Normally during the first one or two weeks or before planting you should apply a little bit of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to help the crop establish. So that's what I will do now and hopefully that will help and also with the further early stages of crop development and tillering. So what I've done is just like I did last year. So I used the fancy mobile phone application that we have developed over many many years here at Erie nutrient manager for RISE. And the only difference is that this year we have a new version for the Philippines version 2.2 so it has a few more refinements. But what it does it walks you through a series of relatively simple questions about your field, what you've done previously in the management, how you manage your organic matter, what you do with your crop residue, what your source of irrigation water is, what your variety is and all of these things that basically one way or another influence the nutrient input-output budget of this particular field. And so we come up with field specific fertilizer recommendation. So I can do this directly here in the field on this smartphone or I can do it before that at home either on a smartphone or on a tablet computer or on a desktop computer. That's actually what I've done. So before I came here I ran through this and I came up with actually two fertilizer recommendations because if you may remember one half of the field this over there we planted with an input variety and this half we planted with a hybrid. So this is all normal and well-known principles of crop nutrition in RISE that are reflected in this software and what I really like with it in particular is that it comes out with a very concrete prescription. So it's printed out and I'm given the the window of when I should apply it pretty precisely and I'm also given a very clear recommendation of what to apply. So my main challenge is now to apply it and also make sure that I apply it relatively uniformly. So I have a bag of fertilizer here which is 1414, 14 percent nitrogen, 14 percent P205, 14 percent K2O. That's my if you wish starter fertilizer for this first application and basically since our recommendation is four bags per hectare now our field is about a quarter of a hectare it means I have to spread this one bag more or less uniformly over this field and what I will do is if I have a little bit left over I will put it on the hybrid strip not on the input strip that's the only adjustment I will make other than that it should probably not take me more than maybe half an hour I hope. What I learned last year is there are a couple of tricks to apply this. One is that I've you know imagined to divide this strip into four strips each of them about six meters wide but the trick is not to walk in the middle of each but a little bit to the side because that way you can throw better and then the other tip they gave me last year was that you have to really swing with your arm wide and keep walking but not sort of looking down and try to sprinkle it like powdered sugar you just go and throw. Yeah here is something I wanted to show you because it's always bothered me you know when you apply fertilizer in most traditional rice growing systems and you don't have a machine basically this is what you see. So you have tiny little young rice plants here in this case spaced quite wide because we used a mechanical transplanter and they're not really at a stage where they have a big root system that can capture much of the nutrients applied and then you throw this by hand broadcast and you see the most of the fertilizer ends up in this case on the surface in between so even if I had incorporated it would still be in between so I keep wondering wouldn't it be nice if on that planting machine that we have we would have been able to already apply some of the fertilizer at least this first dose right away closer to the rose so that it can be captured by the plants and it doesn't end up fertilizing the soil but something has always been bothering me because I'm pretty sure that with this kind of system here our efficiency is not as good as it could be so hopefully in the future those machines can be improved for this purpose particularly even the small one they used