A person’s life can flash before their eyes in a moment. But for wheat, it takes three minutes and 57 seconds.
Or at least it did for Jay Schultz’s field of Stettler hard red spring wheat this year.
The Wheatland County producer borrowed a friend’s trail camera and plunked it down after seeding on May 13 so it looked northwards down a stubble-lined row. Every half-hour during the day, all season long, it snapped a picture, and after harvest wrapped up, Schultz sat down and compiled the images into a YouTube video.
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And while there’s no character arc or plot twists, it is an unexpectedly thrilling ride.
Set to the dramatically sweeping orchestral piece “Diamond Music” (created for the famous DeBeers diamond “shadows and light” ads), the jitterbugging crop shoots skywards in bursts and sees off the threat of volunteer canola following an application of Axial and Infinity. It also suffers as its leaves wither during a month of no rain while the temperature (also recorded for each frame) repeatedly soars past the 100 F mark.
But the featured performer wasn’t given the star treatment.
Every two or three weeks, Schultz would take the camera home, download the images, and put it back in the same spot. He didn’t even clean the lens.
“I just set it up and had no idea at all of what the picture would be like,” said Schultz. “Sometimes I forgot about it. I didn’t realize how quickly the crop grew, so it kind of grew up into the camera a couple of times. But it turned out pretty good.”
And watching 116 days of growth compressed into under four minutes gave him new insights into what happens in the field, he said.
“You get a totally different perspective on things, and in this case, it was the timing,” he said.
“You have a rough idea in your head about crop timelines, but unless you’re an agronomist looking at stages, you don’t always appreciate it. But six, seven days and it’s right out of the ground, just as the pre-burn-off was working. Then you see the flag leaf come out on Day 50 and flowering on Day 60. It’s given me a better understanding of the timing of crop growth.”
Schultz plans to try the time-lapse photography again next year so he can refine his technique. But the music may be less refined.
“Someone suggested I use (rapper) Dr. Dre next time, so maybe I’ll do that.”
