LCC Checker: Read Your Rice Leaves and Know When to Apply Nitrogen
The LCC Checker in anee.io answers one question every rice farmer asks from the third week on: is it time for nitrogen? Tap your own leaf color chart readings for free, or photograph ten leaves and let Anee, your smart farm technician, read their color. The checker then tells you if urea is due and how many kilos your area needs.
How the LCC checker works
Tell it about the field
Pick how the rice was planted and the day it went in. The checker counts the days after transplanting or sowing for you. Add your area and, if you know it, your variety.
Read the leaves
Have a chart? Tap the panel each of ten leaves matches, free. No chart? Photograph ten leaves on white paper and Anee reads them for a few credits.
Get the answer
The checker counts the leaves below the critical panel. When more than half fall below it, nitrogen is due, and it shows the urea per hectare, in bags, and for your own area.
A leaf color chart is a strip of four green panels that rice farmers use to time their nitrogen. The leaf tells you how much nitrogen the plant holds right now, so you feed it when it needs it instead of on a fixed day. The LCC checker keeps that rule and does the counting for you.
Anee reads your leaf photos
Many farmers have never held a leaf color chart. So the checker also works from photos. Lay each leaf flat on white paper, shade it with your body, and take the picture. Before the photos leave your phone, the app measures each leaf's dark green color index, a number from the leaf's own pixels, so Anee reads the color with a measurement beside the picture.
Anee gives each leaf its panel, from 2 for a pale leaf to 5 for a deep green one. She also looks for what else can pale a leaf: insect bites, disease spots, a potassium or zinc shortage, a field gone dry. If she sees one, she says so, because more urea will not fix it.
Anee reads the color. The decision itself is plain arithmetic from her readings: the critical panel is 4 for transplanted rice and 3 for direct wet seeded rice, and nitrogen is due when more than half of the leaves read below it.
How much urea, for your field
When nitrogen is due, the checker follows the usual rates: about 23 kg of nitrogen per hectare in the wet season and 30 kg in the dry season, when the crop can use more. That is about 50 kg or 65 kg of urea per hectare. Type your area and the checker gives the kilos for your own field, so you buy and carry only what you need.
- Apply on 2 to 3 cm of water, late in the afternoon, so less nitrogen is lost to the air.
- Check again in a week, every week, until the first flowers.
- Too early, before about two weeks after transplanting, and the checker tells you to wait: young leaves are pale anyway.
- Past flowering, it tells you to stop: nitrogen then feeds leaves, not grain.
Keep every check
Every reading is saved with its date and its answer, so you can see the field get greener or paler week by week. Give a check its own name and open it again any time, with the date of the next one. Put the urea on your cropping calendar as a task, and check the season's whole fertilizer plan with the NPK Plus calculator. For the full schedule by target yield, read our rice fertilizer schedule.
How the LCC checker helps your crops and your farm
- Nitrogen when the rice needs it. The leaves tell you when urea is due, so you do not apply too early or too late.
- Save on urea. Applying by leaf color avoids extra bags that only feed pests and lodging.
- Less lodging and fewer pests. The right nitrogen at the right time keeps the crop strong and less inviting to insects.
- Easy in the field. Use your own chart, or send photos and let Anee read the color.
Sign up free. Reading your own chart is free on every plan. Anee's photo reading comes with Libre plus Anee and up, and uses a few credits.
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