Field trip day for Andy on a hot, steamy day. He went back to the family farm near Wyoming in Jones County to check in on that water quality trial with the folks from Verdesian Life Sciences and do some drone flying with DuPont Pioneer's Eric Zumbach:
As you can see, this corn is at the V4 stage, meaning it has four leaf collars and is just a little taller than your average water bottle. Mark Seipel and Kevin Bodensteiner from Verdesian Life Sciences went to work digging up a couple of plants, one from the corn where nitrogen stabilizer NutriSphere-N was applied and one from where it wasn't:
The tool of choice, believe it or not...a potato fork!
Meanwhile, Eric got the drone set up in his software, and it takes off from that orange home spot automatically flys to different parts of the field to take pictures:
The drone can be used in combination with this satellite imagery tracking crop health to identify the causes behind any trouble spots:
The green areas indicate the most growth and improvement between satellite imagines, which are taken every two or three days. This field looks to be in good shape and as for differences in root systems at this point, Mark and Kevin say they don't see any but didn't expect to, either, this early:
We'll of course keep checking back on our trial all summer long, courtesy of the folks from Verdesian!