The Pro Farmer Crop Tour wrapped up its trip on Thursday evening. The eastern leg ran the eastern two-thirds of Iowa, while the west leg ran through southern Minnesota. The western leg found plenty of fields suffering from the drought in Iowa, Wednesday. However, the eyes were on what the eastern leg found on their trip.
Eastern tour leader Brian Grete talked about the challenges they had when it came to scouting the damaged fields.
Grete talked about the challenges scouts had in surveying some of the wind damaged fields.
These crops were some decent looking corn before the derecho, and scouts said that it was such a gut punch to look at. It really indicated the potential the Iowa crop had before the storm hit. It was said that the storm seemed to knock out the only green and healthy corn in the state.
Iowa is the most surveyed state on the tour. Almost 400 samples were taken over two days. It is the only state on the tour that has scouts pulling samples from every county. One observation that the tour leaders shared was that despite drought and the derecho, there are still places in Iowa that yield some very good corn. Not all of Iowa has been affected. Time is going to tell how much of the corn will able to be harvested.
Grete talked about what he saw in northeastern Iowa. He was surprised by what he saw with some of the corn crop. Mainly with unexpected drought strain. However, the soybeans looked very consistent with what they had been seeing in other parts of the eastern crop tour.
Scouts felt that any rain that comes to the northeast part of Iowa would be beneficial to soybeans, but it may be too late to add to the corn production.
The final numbers for the state of Iowa were released last night. The corn yield came in at 177.81 bushels per acre, down 2.7% from last year. The soybean pod count in a three-foot square was an average of 1146.3. That was up 3.6% from the year before.
Scouts and analysts on the tour said that Iowa?s crops seemed to be going backward as of August 1st, and not even factoring the storms, they are still going backward. The fact that the numbers are still fairly close to last year shows how much there could have been had Mother Nature not come around and kicked us when we were down.
