Indiana | ....Ron, I hope this answers your question(see copied e-mails). The fields in question yielded at farm avg. this year (51 bpa). I have dealt with this family/ business long enough to give them the benefit of the doubt. Also I was on the crop judging team at Purdue with Tony Beck, which verified for me that this family is genuine. They are interested in your crops good performance . That being said, any company will have its problems. While I was upset this past spring, I was pleased, that I was able to go fairly high up in the company, (the president is Sonny Beck), and get some answers. I am confident they have worked in the past few months to attend to the troubles I had this year past. .... start at the bottom with my first post. Adam, This is Sonny and I have to say I’m mighty proud of the family picture. You have a great family there and we are pleased you thought enough of our company to wear your Becks hats. My guys are looking into and testing some different formulations of the polymer to see if we could improve on the flow problems you were having. I hope to see you and your family at Becknology Days this year and please look me up. Thanks again for your confidence in our products. We certainly appreciate your business. Sonny From: Adam Lemler [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, July 20, 2009 5:47 PM
To: Hooper, G. Thomas
Cc: Woodley, Randy; Rulon, Lee R; [email protected]; Beck, Sonny; Herr, Jim
Subject: Re: Beck's soybeans and Kinze meters My apologies for the late reply. I have not been near my computer lately. I agree with you that large beans tend to be high yielder. 321's have been a great bean for me, fighting 354's for 1st place on my farm the past few years. So in that sense, I have dealt with large seeded bean planting in the past. This is the reason I have the large plates,(for the first year I planted 321's). So I have to disagree with you, that I am focusing on seed SIZE. What I was blaming was UNIFORMITY of seed size. I have no problems with >50 lb. bags of seed beans, and have been happy with Beck's move to the seed count. Yet if I took beans of 2400 seed/lb and 3200 seed/lb and mixed them in the same bag, I would be challenged with a Kinze system to get proper singulation/population ( as you well know). As I noted in my previous e-mail, I was worried I would have some rows with very spotty stands. Also with the Becknology days coming up, I am trying to figure out how to order my 2010 beans. If I have the same problems next spring, should I order 20% more seed? And with seed going to $50+/bag, that is a large negative for me! Regarding the seed treatment, I really can only use conjecture. Until this year I had no troubles with the suregrow in planting. However, after my problems this spring, I was looking for answers. The tackiness of the seed treatment (faststart this year),I noted by squeezing the seed and leaving an indelible thumb/finger nail mark in the coating. I will be the first to admit my limitations to the specifics of coating a seed. Yet in my farmer's logic, if a seed has a soft coating in a bumpy seed unit, it will want to conform to the surface of it's surroundings more, and be less likely to fall free(more cohesive/adhesive). I'm comparing an m&m with a gummy bear in my head at the moment. In the end, my impetus for e-mailing you was to inform. I appreciate your time in replying. On a lighter note, we had our family pictures taken for our Parish directory a couple of months ago. We decided to go with the picture in which everyone had their Beck's hat on. We feel it was a great picture capturing the essence of our family(although I admit I was surprised my wife went along with the idea). Dad thinks(jokingly) I ought to ask for a discount for the free advertising. I thought you would enjoy it as well. P.s. I am still trying to bend my mind around your thoughts of a "middle-of -the-road" kinze plate. Interesting, yet I find as a farmer, I would hate to have to change plates that often. In the past with proper diligence, I only have to change plates once in season, by planting the large seeded beans either 1st or last. Just my thoughts for now. ----- Original Message ----- Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 10:43 AM Subject: RE: Beck's soybeans and Kinze meters Adam, I appreciate you sharing your problems with our soybeans this planting season. I wish you had not had the problems, but do welcome the opportunity to try and reduce these types of issues in the future. I have forwarded your email to Jim Herr our Processing Manager. I think that I agree with all of your conclusions as to probable issues that contributed to the planting problems. The one that you picked out as causing the biggest issue (large seed size) is one that unfortunately we are somewhat limited in our ability to control. The varieties you mention 367NRR, 325NRR and 321NRR all tend to be some of the largest beans we sell each year. While this size issue causes us problems in packaging (big bags, bigger minibulks and limited units in a seedbox), it is the same characteristic that we appreciate in the fall. Since we pick soybean varieties for yield (versus the temptation to select for smaller seeded varieties when we sold by the pound), we many times now get a variety with bigger seed size. This bigger size means many times this varieties average well over 50 pounds per unit delivered to the customer, even though they only have 130,000 soybeans in each unit. I will propose one other issue that we have discussed with Kinze in the past. And that is another plate between the two they now sell. It seems that the 48 cell plate will work ok on beans if the brushes are brand new on some of these middle of the road beans. These middle of the road beans are ones that we think would possibly plant better with brushes that have some wear, but still plant ok, however are not aggressive enough on beans that are in the smaller size range for the bigger plate. We certainly don’t claim to be planter experts, we leave that to Kinze, however we also have some grower experience using that planter type to plant our own crop here at Beck’s. If there is something else you would like for us to do or research better ways to deliver a product to you I am happy to visit further. In addition we could spend much time discussing the many things we are trying to assist planting in conditions that add to the problems. One example would be adding a little talc with the graphite to help in the humid conditions. Again thanks for letting us know you concern. Tom Hooper Sales Manager 317.684.6006 cell From: Adam Lemler [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, July 13, 2009 7:00 PM
To: Hooper, G. Thomas
Cc: Burns, Jim; Woodley, Randy; Rulon, Lee R
Subject: Beck's soybeans and Kinze meters I hope I am sending this to the proper individuals. I was unsure of who to contact. Please forward it if I made an error. I need to inform you about some seed population issues I had this spring with Beck's soybeans. The main trouble I had was with 325 NRR with a 2700seed/#( I have misplaced my lot #), although the 334 LL beans caused me some trouble as well. I have been using kinze bean meters since the mid 90's so I feel I have a handle on what is an acceptable performance and how to adjust my rates accordingly. This year, however, I was quite frustrated with my inability to pin down my populations. I no-till into standing corn stalks with 30" rows. Before I noticed any problems I had planted approximately 130 acres of beans (Beck's 367 and a competitor's number). I generally aim for 115,000-125,000 population ( less for Beck's treated, more for a non-treated bean). The 367's were spot on with the desired pop. After changing over to the 325's I planted a 17 acre field. With an 8 row planter I should have run out close to finishing the field, yet when I opened the planter boxes I was only 1/2 empty. I estimate my actual planted pop. @ 93,413 vs. the 127,962 desired in this particular field. What I found to be the problem was larger seeds were sticking in the cells and essentially plugging/preventing those cells from planting. When changing the seed plates over to the larger 48 cell, I could see almost 60% of the cells had beans stuck in them. Having planted Beck's 321's in the past I just assumed these were bigger seeds even though the bag indicated 2700seed/#. So I changed the plates and adjusted my planter chains accordingly to allow for the large cell plates. I noticed right away, that my monitor was showing a larger number and this became obvious when calculating acres between fills. I was " over planting" with the larger plates. This became very worrisome to me when planting my 334LL's. I had the same problem with the small plates having the beans "stick", and the large plates overplant. I was getting low on my 334LL seed and did not think I would be able to finish the field. I found that my setting the planter for a 124,407 population, ended up being an actual 148,223 planted(large cell). To try to make it finish I lowered my planter to a 95,410 pop. which I figured a 20% overage to give me an actual 114,492 planted. This bothered me quite a bit as I had more than enough seed ordered(Liberty Link), yet I felt I would have to wait for more after running out due to poor planter singulation ( I finished with less than 1/2 bag remaining, I was planning on 3-5 bags left out of 63 acres). Again, I have used the Kinze meters enough years to know that it is possible to be almost exact in population, and know full well that larger seeds need the larger plate. That was not my problem. I will list in order what I think was causing this: 1) Seed size- I feel that even though the bag indicated an average of 2700 seeds/#, the larger seeds looked almost kidney bean shaped, and stuck in the unit (small cells), while the small seeds double planted(large cells). There was a huge range of seed size from smallest to largest. I feel this was the primary cause to my problems. 2) Tacky seed- I found that the treatment was tacky which would induce the large seed to "stick". I do use graphite(almost too much), and this helped mitigate the problem somewhat, but did NOT eliminate it. 3) Humid conditions- This would go along with tacky seed sticking. 4)Brush wear-I am sure that having new Kinze brushes installed in the meters would have helped. But again, my experience with the Kinze meters tells me this was not a primary problem. The brushes I used had only 140acres/row on them. I have seen good singulation out of a very wore out meter, and even then I should have been able to allow for population discrepancies given that the seed was uniform in size. I do know of one other neighbor in the area having similar problems with Beck's 321's this year. He also is set up with Kinze. I told my dealer about this,( Herm Rettinger), but wanted to inform you of my problems directly. Please let me know if you want anymore information from me. I will try to find the lot #'s I copied down from the bags, it is here in my paperwork somewhere. Perhaps Beck's may need to start separating beans into grade sizes? At >$50/ bag I get very upset when I cannot pin down my seed populations. I have had a good experience in dealing with Beck's for many years, and hope to keep this relationship going.
Edited by rebuilder 1/11/2010 08:11
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beck soybeans
