#cornyields

We started our morning in Boone, IA waiting for the sun to rise over our first crop stop. Our route took us first as far west as Sac City, IA where we continued to try and comprehend what the windstorm on Aug 10 did to the corn crop. We did note some bean damage but only in fields affected by both wind and hail. We then turned north, through Spencer, IA and into Minnesota. Reached our most northwestern point of the trip in the early afternoon. The rest of the day we spent heading east through Minnesota and back into northeastern Iowa. Another 450 miles and 7 crop stops…

When asked what we saw today the most common denominator was a lack of moisture causing a haircut to yields. This was especially true in western Iowa. It was less of a problem as we traveled across Minnesota and we suspect crops even further north faired even better. We are still yet to use any of our creative solutions to managing mud. We have started having a conversation about test weight concerns with this year’s finishing weather. Especially because of the advanced state of the corn crop.

Tomorrow, we will start again crossing what we suspect is another heavily wind damage region as we travel from Waterloo to Davenport in Iowa. After that, we are interested in seeing northern Illinois which has been drier of late than the central areas we have already sampled.

We wish those along the Louisiana and Texas coast safe harbor. Until tomorrow, this is the IAG Crop Tour signing off!

After getting over our excitement of seeing our first wind damaged field we had heard so much about, we turned our attention to the bean field across the street. The truth of the matter is the beans did not care one bit about the historic storm. There was no evidence of damage across the entire field. Pod counts were 39 and 48 with both plants standing a healthy 44 inches. Node counts were 16 and 20 respectively, in line with pretty good beans that we have been seeing this whole trip. With a population estimate of 170k per acre, we think this field could be 65 plus.

Our stop in Monroe, IA revealed our first evidence of lodging from the August 10th wind storm that hit central Iowa. All areas of the field had at least some damage. Most of the field was extremely difficult to walk through, let alone get a sample. And getting that sample took a little, excuse the term, 'windage' and guess work. One area was particularly easy to walk through but that was because we were walking on top of the crop. After settling on a spot to sample, we found an initial stand of 33k but only an average of 29K harvestable ears per acre. Ears were fully dented with kernels very close to black layer. The ears counted were larger on average than most we have seen this trip, ranging from 16x35 to 20x40 with the average about 18x37. These harvestable ear counts and size will carry this field and still have a descent yield estimated at 225 bpa. What this field could have been we will never know, but by our calculations it could have pushed over 265 bpa.