CS vs 750a Xmas update

It's about 6 weeks since drilling, and the field is looking good, with only a small amount of blackgrass. Excellent.The nice people at ProCam have set up some plant population experiments for me, and have now performed two counts. At one end of the field (slightly lighter soil) there are 10 sample locations for each drill, so the results should be statistically significant. At the other, heavier, end we have just got one sample site per drill. The first set of results were interesting, but it turns out that there had been a bit of an error, and the varying drills' row widths had not been taken into account. In a nutshell, that's bad news for the CS and CO8, as their plant counts had been overstated by around 45%.Let's get on to the data. Remember, all drills put seed on at the same rate, which was 225kg/ha AKA 480 seeds/m². Here's the lighter land bit, with 10 samples per drill:And the heavier bit, with just the one sample:Clearly, the 750a has managed quite a lot better rates of establishment than the other two. There has been slug activity, which probably explains the decreasing plant counts over the last month; the heavier section was pelleted, the lighter bit was not. The differing growth stages are interesting, but at this point, I don't know what is "best". Could it be the CS is the lowest disturbance, and less mineralised N means slower plant development? That's not what a certain S.Townsend preaches, but I have no idea if he is right or not.My personal feeling is that the differences in growth stages will even out by the time summer comes around. Luckily we will be measuring the yields scientifically (and hopefully significantly), and that, as always, is what matters here.Next update in the spring.