The Pro Farmer Crop Tour is wrapping up today in Southern Minnesota and Central & Eastern Iowa. Yesterday the Western leg of the tour went through the Western third of Iowa in crop districts one, four, and seven. Many marketers were holding their breath on this part of the trip, because Iowa is a top corn producer and has been the only one of the three ?I States? that has been having drought. The west has been taking the brunt of the adverse conditions, and many were expecting the tour to be pulling bad numbers.
While they don?t comb every square inch of the region, they do cover a lot of ground at random. There is no picking and choosing to find the best or worst looking fields.
In the southwest region of crop district 7, numbers for corn were at 173.7 bpa. That?s down ten percent from last year?s 192. Western tour lead Chip Flory says that this is more about how good the last couple of years were in the southwest than how bad this crop is.
District four in West-Central Iowa also saw a ten percent drop in corn to 181 bpa. This was down from 201 last year. Most of this was because of small grain length, just like in South Dakota and Nebraska.
District 1 in the Northwest only saw a 1.5 percent drop to 181.12 bpa.
On soybeans, crop scouts were surprised. Pod counts in a 3-foot by 3-foot square were adequate. District 7 saw a ten percent drop to 1,223.8. District 4 came in at 1,258.9, which is a three percent gain. And District one saw their average hold even with 2021 at 1,089.7. Brent Judisch talks about what he saw.
Judisch echoed the concerns where conditions were the driest. That was near Sioux City and LeMars.
The tour wraps up today in Rochester, MN. The Eastern leg of the tour will finish Iowa today, while the Western leg covers Southern Minnesota.
