Understanding 2025 Soybean Stand Count
Introduction: Advancing Soybean Stand Count Insights
Accurately assessing soybean stand is key to evaluating crop establishment and replant decisions. In 2025, Taranis improved this process by shifting from individual plant counts to percent canopy coverage. This new approach leverages high-resolution imagery and AI-driven analysis to measure the percentage of ground covered by soybean canopy at VC and V1 growth stages. By incorporating the grower’s target population, the model converts percent canopy coverage into an estimated plants per acre, offering a more comprehensive, scalable, and efficient representation of field conditions. This method improves accuracy by factoring in plant size and density, not just counts. The stand count map highlights emergence variability, helping advisors and growers make better replant and management decisions. This document explains the shift from traditional stand counts to percent canopy coverage, detailing its process, benefits, and how it helps optimize early-season management.
Soybean Stand Count: Old Method
Taranis previously calculated soybean stand count by capturing high-resolution aerial images during Missions and using AI to count individual plants. This method replicated the traditional manual approach, utilizing up to x10 plants per sampling point. Using this approach, Taranis provided a plants per acre map, highlighting stand variability across the field.
Soybean Stand Count: New Method
Since soybean plants can compensate for yield loss from small row gaps and lower-density rows, the traditional stand count proved less effective in guiding replant decisions. To better support growers, we developed a different methodology that evaluates canopy coverage at early crop stages, providing a more accurate assessment of stand establishment and replant needs.
How it Works
- A Mission is flown at key phenological stages – targeting VC and V1 growth stages.
- Taranis’ high-resolution imagery captures field conditions during these early growth stages.
- AI analyzes the images to measure the percentage of ground covered by soybean canopy rather than counting individual plants.
- The image below includes circles to help illustrate how canopy coverage is calculated by the model. The final soybean stand count output will not include this visualization.
- The % canopy coverage is then converted to plants per acre using the target population provided by the advisor or grower.
- Formula: % of canopy x target population.
- A stand count map is generated and visualized in plants per acre, providing a clear representation of stand variability across the field.
Counting Plants vs. % of Canopy
The example below compares stand count from plant counting (48% stand, 72K PPA) with a canopy coverage estimate (95% canopy, 142.5K PPA). This broader approach offers a more comprehensive view of stand health, aiding advisors in replant and management decisions based on overall field conditions rather than isolated counts.
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