Written by Trevor Enerson
This has been great week for me. As a Seed Agronomist, the most hectic, but also the most thrilling time of the year has gone by. It’s odd really, how much I really enjoy the planting season and the chaos surrounding trying to get all beans treated, loaded, and delivered and then how much I enjoy it being over. I think it’s the accomplishment part of it. I look around at a warehouse that has gone from full of boxes and bags just waiting to be planted to a warehouse with just a few full bags left and stacks of empty, broken down boxes alongside empty pallets. A lot of work, in the seed world, is done in a very short amount of time.
Don’t get me wrong here, there’s a lot left to do this growing season. The corn needs to be returned, the few unused soybeans need to be dumped and all pallets and boxes need to be returned. After that, we have a season of walking fields and helping to solve problems or maximize yields. The one thing we don’t do right away around here, after 2014, is completely clean the treater. That year, after soybean planting was finished, I got a little bit cocky and immediately went through the treater getting everything ready to put away. Not long after, we had a huge hail event come our way and over 1000 units of beans went out the door as replants. So, if all it takes is me waiting a couple week to finally put it away, I’ll make the sacrifice. This is the only thing I ever do that involves any sort of superstition.
The other thing that makes this time of the season so enjoyable for me is that there is so much to see in fields and plots. We get to go out and look at emergence and differentiate hybrids. We get to see how well soybeans have been able to emerge through some somewhat adverse conditions at times. We get to see how this starter fertilizer or that seed treatment has helped visually. The combine will tell the whole story but the visual side is just as interesting to me even if it is not necessarily meaningful once October and November hit. It gives both growers and myself something to look at and to be hopeful for. Maybe we found that high return starter that we’ve been looking for. Maybe that in-furrow application in soybeans looks like it’s making a real difference. It’s just really exciting to potentially see things start happening. So right now, even though the chaos is over, the fun is just starting.
Note: I know people are reading this and wonder why I’m tempting Mother Nature. Like I said, I’m not a superstitious person and take no responsibility for future weather events. If I had control over those, we’d know it by now.
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