Day 4 Wrap Up

With well over 2,000 miles under our belts over the course of 96 hours, we wrapped the 2020 IAG Crop Tour late Thursday night. Tomorrow, we will crunch all the data and put together a synopsis. Until then, we will just cover what we saw today.

Starting in Waterloo, Iowa we headed south and straight out of the gate we ran into another swath of wiped out corn fields. I have never seen such widespread devastation of not just corn fields, but grain bins, homes, cars, and trees. The scope of that damage is still difficult to grasp. Just driving the region, you can smell the downed corn (just so you know, it smells like fermenting silage). We do know that there is a incredible quantity of corn that is now maturing either on or close to the ground that we have no idea how to handle. Many of these decisions will be made with the help of insurance adjusters and we just don’t know what these policies will be yet. We were able to at least partially prove our theory that bean fields in the affected area could have survived without much yield loss.

Along the i-80 corridor and over the Great Mississippi, there was still wind damaged corn fields but we suspect the vast majority of these acres will be harvestable with perhaps some minor losses. Moving back into Illinois and the Eastern Corn Belt, we were back to seeing solid corn and decent to above average bean samples.