After estimates of a near-record crop in Ohio for a second year and a lot of potential in South Dakota on Monday, the Pro Farmer Crop Tour scouts found even better results in Nebraska and Indiana on Tuesday.
“The soybeans looked good. Even the shorter beans were loaded, and all these beans were setting pods. I mean, there were no blooms left on any of these beans. The producers who have gotten these beans in a fairly timely manner, they were all mature beans, and they were filling pods. So that tells me that, you know, the soybeans did well. We had a pretty good day on the route.”
Longtime Eastern Leg Scout Bryan Coffman of Iowa says the final Indiana numbers showed over 1,400 pods in a three-by-three area, 7.5 percent over last year and some two hundred more than the three-year average. Coffman says they did notice some corn diseases.
“The first part of the day, we were seeing quite a bit of Tar Spot. As we went on and we got into about the sixth and seventh stops of the day, when we started to move into Fulton and Cass counties, the Tar Spot kind of went away. The only thing we noticed was there were a few places where, you know, some places where there were maybe some excessive drowned out spots or some fields showing maybe a little bit of nitrogen deficiency, some stuff like that.”
The final yield estimate there was 187.5 bushels, some three percent more than
last year. On the Western Leg of the Tour, Leader Chip Flory says the difference in planting dates was evident in corn fields with differing ear placements.
“You have to reach up to at least head high to count in here, and then the next one, you’re at chest high. The next one might be waist-high so that there’s a wide range in the ear sets out there. So the emergence this year was just all over the place.”
Regarding soybeans…
“South of Lincoln, we did go through a dry area, and it went on for about 40, maybe not quite 50 miles to the East, where we saw some drought stress. So we picked up some samples in that area that might have been a little low on the pod count.”
Still, final estimates showed corn projections up two-plus percent over the three-year average, and soybean pod counts up over a percent from a year ago.