The Crop Tour wrapped up last week and Pro Farmer is predicting a record 177 bushels per acre on corn and for soybeans, a whopping 51.2 bushels per acre. Editor Brian Grete says he was impressed with what he saw last week.
“A lot of good crops, to be honest with you. We found heavy ear counts across the corn belt – the only state that had lower ear counts vs a year ago in Minnesota. We also found some areas that were obviously impacted by this year’s dryness and drought. There was quite a divide between the Eastern Corn Belt and the Western Corn Belt. On the Eastern side of things, very good crops, record crop potential. They are going to need some rains to finish things off but boy they’ve really set themselves up to have some pretty bumper crops over there.”
They predict Indiana corn at 200 bpa and Indiana soybeans at 62 bpa. Both would be records if realized. They do present that with the caveat that more moisture is needed to reach that number.
On the Western side of the Corn Belt, “You know, Iowa’s kind of the mix, it’s got some good, some bad, we saw a lot of variability there,” says Grete. “Nebraska the irrigated crop is really good, the dryland crop has suffered because of the dryness, especially over the past month or so here and that crop is kind of going backwards. In South Dakota, there were some decent crops there, probably a little bit better than what some of the Scouts anticipated going into it.”
The national Pro Farmer Estimates, Grete stresses, and are more than just results from last week’s tour.
“Our crop tour results we release Monday – Thursday, through the week, those are Crop Tour only. So, that’s into the field, pull samples, tabulate it, put it into the spread sheets and that type of stuff and it kicks it out. The Pro Farmer Estimates, at the end of the week, they take into account Crop Tour data plus other factors. We make changes for harvested acreage and adjustments there, we take into account the areas outside of where we sampled from on Crop Tour.”
He says they raised harvested acreage by 910,000 acres vs USDA’s June estimate and are predicting total corn production at 15.1 billion bushels and a 4.43 total soybean production of 4.43 billion bushels.
“Every year is a different story on Crop Tour, and that’s the one thing that makes it unique is that you think that some year is going to be the same as the past and they are never exactly the same. We knew coming into this one that it was going to be the good in the east vs the poorer in the West, and would we find enough bushels in the East stops to cover what was lost in the West. I think we have the answer to that but there is still some uncertainty because we don’t know what the late season weather is going to be.”
He says they collected record number of samples this year, with around 1500 being the normal amount and this year over 1700 were submitted.
Source: NAFB News Service