Mid West Crop Tour – Wednesday

What a difference a day makes.  On Tuesday, we saw really good corn in Indiana and slightly better than average corn in Eastern Illinois. I woke up this morning expecting to see excellent corn in the rest of Illinois and pretty good corn in Iowa.

We left Bloomington and headed toward Peoria to get started on our route.  We headed north to Sterling and then turned down to the Mississippi River and crossed over at Fulton/Clinton.  We then headed slightly north and west through Clinton and Cedar counties and finished our route.

The corn in Illinois on our route was highly variable.  We had a low of about 59 near the Illinois River in Marshall County and did not get any corn over 200 until Stark County.  We definitely saw some moisture issues in all of the counties on the route through Illinois.  We could see good rain to the south today, but it never got up north where it was needed.  Our Illinois average was 171.  Even if we threw out our low yield, the resulting average would still be under 190.  The low yield we took was probably very representative of the area.  Our soybean average for Illinois was 1,359 which is a little better than average.

As we crossed into Iowa, the lack of moisture became even more apparent, especially in the soybeans.  They had not canopied at all and the pod counts were extremely low in some areas.  The final corn count for Iowa was 178 and it would take some rain and good weather to reach those numbers.  The soybeans were all over the place with our last stop of the day at 480 pounds per three-foot square.  There are good beans out there, but they need rain.  Our final average for Iowa soybeans was only 672, but that was only three counts.  There was also a lot more issues with drainage and disease in Iowa than we saw in the first three states.

The bottom line for me today was good yields, but not up to the hype we had heard about Illinois.  We only had three counts in Iowa so it is difficult to say much about that state yet.  It will be interesting to get the final Illinois numbers tonight.  I believe the USDA 188 number is probably not too far off.

Paul Neiffer, CPA