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Good afternoon. This is Mark Gruhn with Renze Seeds.
This afternoon, we're going to show how
even though a field that
in the middle of August in 2012 a corn field
can look bright green
as green as a well-watered, well-fertilized lawn
can be
a little bit different once you walk into the field analyze the ear
size
Now I'm gonna step out of the way
and show
how green this field is
And it's a little bit tipped
as far as sunburn goes. Three days ago we were in this field and it was
completely green but it's still very very healthy very very green
Now what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna walk
this way through ten rows
through ten rows
And I'm gonna find ten plants, the other day we found twenty let's cut
shorter we'll find ten plants. I'm gonna grab the first plant I see and that tenth row and
we'll count
ten plants to the left
and we'll show you the ear size
So Dave, keep her running and keep it still as you can and follow me. So here we go
there's one, two
three
four
five
six
this is seven
eight
nine, is this ten?
all right
thought I'd lost count
OK we'll start here
and
Dave, here's
ear number one, I don't know if you can
zone in on that. Here's ear two
there's nothing on the plant three, nothing on plant four, almost nothing on plant five
we will harvest these ten ears
and we'll take a picture of it when we're done
Now we've harvested the ears from those ten plants
the first thing you'll notice is
there's not ten ears here
Here's the order, plant number one had this, plant number two actually has
some kernels on it, plant three completely baren
plant four
and so on
Now you'll remember how
bright green and healthy and happy this field looked
The stress of
filling the kernels on an ear
is called
yield
sink
the more kernels there are per acre that need to be filled
the more stress there is
on that corn crop
for photosynthesis creating sugar up taking moisture and nutrients
to fill these kernels. The more kernels, the more stress
Since there was almost no kernels in this field
It was almost a total absence of stress, therefore the field was still
bright green almost
head to toe
What made this field stand out this year, is this is 2012 and we are
going through what may well be recognized as the worst
heat and drought event in the history of the United States
so under that intense stress
this bright green field just stood out amongst
all surrounding fields that were going through early death
so we walked in there, we suspected this is what we would see
and we did
it's bright green because there's almost no kernels in there. We estimated the
yield of this field would be
maybe five bushel maybe less