 It's 40 days after planting and so we're pretty much at the end of tillering, getting clothes or may have reached already in the hybrid panic alienation stage. So what we're gonna do today is take a quick look at the overall situation how successful have we been with establishing the crop, the vegetative growth and then decide some of the things that we need to do next. So Lee, when you look at this left and right for me, so here is the hybrid, here is the inbred, do you see any differences do you think in general? We have a reasonable looking crop here. First I might just just reflect on where we were a week ago. I was agonizing over the space between the plants, now that space has started to be covered over, we've have had a week of fairly sunny fairly warm weather and it's improving a lot. So putting on that nitrogen fertilizer on a week ago is starting to have an effect now, the nitrogen would have been absorbed and metabolized by now and it's starting to look a lot better. I mean this is of course a totally representative plant sample that we've pulled here which may be a little bit exaggerated but you can see at least visually the hybrid seems to be more vigorous and taller already at this stage than the inbred. That's pretty clear isn't it yeah but you did point out that the hybrid is slightly shorter season for I. It is about a week earlier so it's expected to be a bit ahead already but part of that is probably hybrid vigour and what I notice here is I don't know if you can see that easily but it really has very strong stems already here whereas the inbred stems seem to be a bit weak already at this point. You can see that now whether that's just hybrid vigour or whether it's part of the reason why, part of the reason is that it's ahead a few days but generally speaking you can see planted on the same day quite a difference in vegetative growth development and when you look at the whole field you can see the difference this strip over here divided here hybrid in the inbred and you can see that for the whole field. You have here an example of quite a large space between the seedlings where the machine was driven a little bit wide from one pass to the other. I'm quite sure Akim was driving the machine when this happened. No no no way that must have been one of yours and that is more than half a meter I would say. Look at it. A lot of the stuff. What much we can do it's just too wide spacing and yeah. Now let's look over another field here which has been planted by hand on the side here that'll make you see the difference. We've got here a typically manually transplanted rice field in a research station I want to point out. So people are using a string and to basically create a square grid and then people are really planting it very carefully. You can see you know if I would take a ruler you know this is 20 by 20 plus minus 1 centimeter. So this is perfect plant spacing. I want to introduce here James Guilty. He is a postdoc here with Erie working in the ecological intensification research group and they've done things a little bit different in terms of using a mechanical planter at least from the outside it looks that they've been a bit more successful in getting a more uniform crop established in the video. So James what were the positive and negative lessons that you've learned and what did you actually do here? So this is a zero chillage plot where we've used a mechanical transplant and we have a residue retained and a residue returned. One problem we have with the mechanical transplant where you have residue is that you may not get soil contact with the seedlings. The planted can just drop the seedlings on top of the residue. So if you say zero till so you didn't really plow or puddle or muddle anything or nothing? No cultivation whatsoever. So we planted straight into the soil. We soaked the soil for three days or five days and then we planted that saves a lot of energy. Energy, water, labor but what we're finding is that this is using a lot more water than where we've cultivated so we're applying water here every day. Water percolating through the crop. And that's probably because the cloud pan isn't as as uniform across this as we've been in a public plot. And that seems to potentially have introduced rats so where we have less water the rats are happier to go into our pots and we've just seen rat damage this morning. But this technology potentially would be more suited to the wet season when we get water for free. But I think the point is that it is possible to do mechanical planting with a very much reduced or even no tillage. Yeah so we're going to look into a reduced tillage next rather than a zero till to see if that actually gets us better soil contact because potentially if we are leaving the seedlings on top although they look happy they may be prone to lodging later in the season particularly if the panic is at a large and the grains are full basically. Well great keep trying and this looks good to me so it's a lot to look. Yeah thanks. We also have the occasional spot with quite a high weed density. Now it might be this area was a little bit higher and the soil has become a little bit drier and the efficacy of the herbicide has broken down that may be possible. Looking at it by eye I don't think so. What I suspect it is is a missed patch in the application process here at Erie like many many places in Asia herbicides and other pesticides are still applied by hand and when you're waving a single nozzle by hand it is extremely difficult to get good coverage adequate coverage everywhere. There will be missed patches there'll be doubled up patches and I suspect what we're looking here is a missed strip the shape of the strip there and there's another one just up ahead. I suspect these are patches with pre-emergent herbicide. So what we're going to do about that now? We're going to hand weed these little patches. We could either apply a herbicide in these little patches or hand weed but they are quite small. Yeah. We could almost be forgiven for ignoring them and walking away but I think we'll hand weed them for the sake of the pursuit of perfection shall I say. So we're very close to a panicle initiation stage so that is when our third fertilizer application needs to go on because the crop really now needs extra nitrogen because it's going to shoot up produce a lot more biomass and the reproductive phase is starting so you can't really afford having an hydrogen deficiency at this point so the Nogen manager recommendation was to apply the next dose of urea at this stage and so that is going to happen in the next one or two days but to improve the efficiency of the fertilizer so what we're going to do is we're going to drain off the standing water we don't have a huge amount of water on there maybe just five centimeters or two inches but we're going to drain that off so that we can apply the urea on the surface let it react a little bit and then maybe a day later irrigate and move it into the soil so that should be the best practice we can use to improve the efficiency of the fertilizer