The corn and soybean crops in Illinois are as advertised, according to Pro Farmer Scouts on Day Three of Crop Tour.

“Corn yields were a little more variable probably than a lot of the routes saw, but I’d expect that, given the real estate that we were looking at. We still had a top-end yield of about 254 bushels on one sample, and we had a lower-end yield of about 144 there. Again, to be expected.”

Pro Farmer Eastern Leg Tour Agronomist Mark Bernard says in years where Illinois has had a record corn crop, that variability has existed, and Pro Farmer is projecting a 204.14 bushel per acre yield, which would be a new record and a five percent increase over a year ago.

“On the bean side, I was kind of wowed by that. I look back on some of the other years that I’ve run this same route, and the pod counts were nowhere near what we had today. Big beans. I had six of the samples I pulled today were plants with over 100 pods per plant. One of those plants was two hundred and fifty pods.”

Bernard says statewide pod counts in a three-by-three square were up over 11 percent from 2023 to 1,419. It was a little different story on the Western Leg through Western Iowa as, even though yield projections and pod counts in Crop Reporting Districts 4 and 7 were higher, District #1 was hit hard by Mother Nature. Tim Gregersen was scouting on the Western Leg in Iowa.

“Saw a little bit of storm damage. Not bad, but the nitrogen deficiency is going to hurt that corn crop up in Northwest  Iowa. Seems like they probably didn’t go back and side-dress. Perhaps it was just too wet all the way along that the yield’s definitely down up there.”

Regarding disease…

“Less soybean diseases, more diseases in corn than normal. But we did run into aphids the further north we went and up in here, west of Spencer and over toward George, we saw a couple of sprayers actually running, and so we’re assuming they were out there chasing those aphids.”