Article Submitted by Advanced Ag Solutions
Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “rain makes grain?” Well, for the farmer, rain makes money. We’ve recently been swamped with feedback about outlook of the US corn crop… and more specifically, the outlook for actual farmers. If you are subscribing to Optmzr.co text service or enrolled your actual fields you have probably noticed your yields going down and then rebounding rapidly just a day later. Why does this happen? Great question!
We use actual fields and actual soil type data from your location. Each soil is depleted of water by crop uptake. After several days between rains the water levels go down and down and our historical forecasts look forward to “normal” remainder of the year in terms of weather. This causes the projected yields to go down as the forecast does not allow for “catching up.” However, when it actually does rain sometimes it’s more than historical for that date and this recharges the soil and therefore acts like a reset switch on the diminishing yield potential.
In fact, my home town of Connersville, IN just got rain and my yield projections jumped from 151 bpa to 167 bpa. These changes reflect both how thin your soils are as well as how much rain you’ve received. Farmers know this intuitively but get terribly fearful and struggle to make quantitative management decisions like “is this crop still worth applying fungicide on?” With this tool an Advisor and grower can play some what if scenarios regarding their weather and risk tolerance and come up with a plan that meets farmer’s goals.
Early in the season you induce limits in terms of how much seed and fertility you put down. This is based on your outlook for your soil and weather. Now we give you more real data to work with for every day’s decisions.