Week 5 Submission - Tom Frappier

Tom Frappier

A new Strategic Account I took on last summer is a prospect for Pioneer. We were able to get 6 units of P9492AM on his farm to look at. He’s a strong supporter of Monsanto/Bayer products (including planting a corn plot they monitor with competitive products) so we were happy to get on the farm through a rec from the local Centrol crop consultant. He planted the P9492AM in a split planter comparison with a new DeKalb product (DKC44-50). He told me where the field was so I drove over to see it and put my drone to work not knowing how soon I might get back on a good day to fly! I flew the field with my drone on June 14 and got to see the variability in the field for stand counts.

 

Now that I knew where the field was, I was able to turn on the imagery and get a good view of the field. It was interesting how several areas really stuck out in his field – and that imagery could pick that up this early in season!

I texted him a screenshot of the imagery and he replied back that he had seen that the week before when he was out flying. Here’s his two pics where the darker green areas show up again.

After I sent him the stand count data, I told him if he was willing to share his as-planted data with us, I could be more focused in my scouting and watching this field over the summer. A couple days later, I had the data he sent from Climate downloaded through Synch Pro. Suddenly, the picture got much clearer because now I knew what was planted where and I could see his variable rate population. It was great to see that his corn plot had 2 Pioneer hybrids in it along with 8 DK hybrids. The other key factor in having the as-planted data is that you now have GPS working for you through the Encirca Pro app. As you can see his plot lines up perfectly with the imagery in the split-screen on EP.

In looking at his as-planted data, I noticed that he planted fairly high but the drone counts certainly didn’t match up. But after walking around in the field, it was obviously there were emergence problems and much of the field is planted to one hybrid that even he said didn’t like this spring conditions.

After checking out the plot, I walked all the way over to his split-planter comparison and grabbed a several stand counts.

Below is the screenshot I sent him of the stand counts. You can’t tell from this shot, but I was very close to where the drone counts were taken and if you look back, you can see that’s where the highest drone counts are so that gave me more confidence in ISAiA!

The grower is definitely interested in our imagery (he said he had already downloaded the EP app) and how it might help their operation so I hope this will open the door wider for Pioneer in 2020!