Crop Tour Recap

Here are my comments regarding the crop tour:

• The corn crop looked good, however, most of Iowa had issues with tip-back where the water on the ground deprived the ear of the nutrients to get the last full inch of the ear filled.  This is the main reason why the Iowa crop looks like it will be lower than last year.  We also saw a lot of nitrogen loss again due to the standing water, etc.
• The soybean crop looked excellent.  On our tests, we actually had two plants with over 200 pods with the highest at about 240.
• South Dakota corn and bean crop looked good, however, there are a lot of fields with 10% or more of the field under water so the actual yield with be difficult to calculate.
• Northern Nebraska is going to help keep the Nebraska yield overall even with last year since the southeastern part of the state does not look as good as last year.  Our night in Grand Island was nice, however, the next morning we woke up to rain all day, so that part was not great for counting crops.
• Iowa is down due to the reasons above, however, for us, southwestern and northwestern Iowa looked pretty good.
• Minnesota was not quite as good as we thought it would be for corn, but still pretty good overall.

From Sunday afternoon after landing in Kansas City to Friday afternoon getting on the plane in Kansas City to fly home, I put on over 2,000 miles on the auto driving the tour.  On the western leg, there were about 40 participants with about the same on the eastern leg.  Participants included farmers, the Pro-Farmer staff, media, agronomists, crop insurance agents, seed consultants, etc.

The meetings each night had at least 150 participants with the local farmers turning out to see how the corp looked, etc.  I enjoyed these meetings immensely since it allowed me to see how the local farmer thought there crops were doing and it allowed me to ask questions regarding their farming practices, etc.

Again, I had a great time and highly suggest you consider attending the tour at some time.