 welcome back to the show we're in the coffee shop now here so I think like most good farmers should do at the end of the season you sit down in the coffee shop with your neighbor and you drink coffee in our case this is cappuccino here and says what has worked well in your crop and what hasn't so that's what we're about to do here so Lee when you look back at the whole crop very happy is what we got or not so happy I think my feelings are mixed I suspect we'll run through the details shortly but we set a goal and we certainly didn't reach the goal we'll look at why shortly some things we could have controlled some things we definitely couldn't I would dare to suggest it was an interesting yes if we're gonna do two things we're going to first analyze the yield gaps and why we didn't achieve the seven tons per hectare that we had set out to start with and then we are going to look at whether we've made a profit or not so the economic performance of things and what our cost of production was what our income was and maybe also have a discussion and where we might have saved some money yeah so maybe I'll start out with the the yield discussion a little bit and I'm going to show you something here which I've drawn up on a board because we need to look at some numbers to understand what we mean so what we have done here is you can see four different yield numbers and tons per hectare and we start on the top so first we did the crop simulation analyzer so we use the crop simulation model orisa 2000 and we used the the climate data for the last 20 years 1992 to 2012 and simulated for the same variety and the same planting data we used what could have been in each of these years the theoretical yield potential if nothing would be limiting the crop so it's any function of solar radiation or sunshine and the temperature and the date of planting and the variety and things like that so on average the theoretical the theoretical yield potential in our location would have been about 10 and a half tons per hectare or 10.6 in this simulation when we then run the model again and just enter the weather data for this cropping season for our field as it was in this particular year the first thing we noticed is that the yield potential in our year was only 8.7 tons per hectare and you can see the first yield gap here between 10.6 and 8.7 so a difference of nearly two tons basically yield potential loss or less yield potential due to poor weather this year so we were really really unlucky this has been in terms of climate one of the worst dry seasons that we've had here at our location in the last 20 years so there's nothing we can do about this we can't control water weather but right there we had a nearly two ton drop in yield potential so then when we looked at what we could have harvested you know if we didn't have the lodging and the associated yield losses at the end because of the shattering of the grain we estimated at that time that we had nearly six tons per hectare yield standing there 5.9 roughly speaking you know what we then actually harvested to which the combine was 5.24 at the end so we had about 0.65 tons year losses that were caused at the end very much towards the end because of lodging and the associated combined harvest losses again not much we can do about that we've discussed the reasons for the lodging I think it was a combination of very humid or rain conditions at the late stage and the variety that we grew was highly susceptible to that in terms of lodging. Our assessment is that most of this is actually caused by a variety of crop management issues we didn't think that we had insufficient water or nutrient supply as a reason but probably uneven crop establishment a big factor early on and then a variety of pest problems so at the early stages we had a lot of rap damage over 8% assessment at the early vegetative stage wall maggots chewing on the leaves and then later we had 5% whiteheads or yield loss to the stem borers a number of leaf damaging insects false mud 8% some sheaf blight and sheaf rot weeds 5% occurrence and probably also some losses to the birds so if you add those things all up each of those has a small contribution but it can be quite large all together so from a management point of view I think some of those things probably could have been avoided particularly I think the crop establishment early on was something where we have learned a few lessons in terms of land preparation and leveling and being able to get a more uniform crop established so we did a lot of reseeding and replanting but still ended up having quite uneven plant stands and some parts of the field and when you look at the whole field then this can be leading to a year loss the good news is we made a profit that's good not a huge profit but a profit so we grew 5.24 tons to the hectare of rice and we've valued it at 14 pesos per kilogram here in the Philippines which is equivalent to about 30 US cents or $300 per tonne of paddy rice in summary I doubt these figures are particularly visible to the film we earn $440 from the field we spent $350 growing it so we made according to this $84 in profit which at least pays for the coffee we're drinking and a fair bit more well that's for the field but if we extrapolate this to a whole hectare which is what a normal farmer would probably have so that's a net profit of $335 per hectare so is that a normal profit what a farmer would be happy I think it's probably quite common particularly if you have deep wet irrigation and pumping close to cover if you are an irrigated farmer in the Philippines who has access to canal water or irrigation scheme water the typical profit is probably more like $500 per hectare that's what I remember measuring once so we are below that but that's primarily really the reason is because of the high irrigation cost which probably explains as you look across the rice growing world that drier season rice is generally confined to those locations where water is easy and cheap to access yeah it has to do exactly that reason good I think that wraps it up we've not become rich at least we haven't lost money I think we've learned a lot yeah we have so we'll promise to do better next time right cheers