The Mid West Crop,Tour Begins

The Eastern Leg of the Mid West Crop Tour met up at a hotel in Dublin, Ohio tonight and got instructions for this years crop tour. A nice new feature for this year is the introduction of an App to record our counts and then submit them electronically. This should allow Pro Farmer to get the data into their system on a much more efficient manner than in years past.

Many times the dinner sessions to well into the night waiting for final numbers. I am very hopeful that this new method will cut down on the wait time.

The corn counts are done by going 35 paces past the end rows. We then place a 30′ rope with a hook on one end. We count all of the ears in that 30′ section plus the one on either side we are ending up with the number of ears in 60′ total. We then grab the 5th 8h and 11th ear and average the length of those ears and then the average of the rows around.

Example: we get 100 ears for an average of 50. The three ears are 7.5″, 8″, and 6.25″ for an average of 7.25″. The kernels around are 16, 18, and 18 for an average of 17.33. We multiply 50 X 7.25 X 17.33 to get 6282 and then divide by 30″ row to get estimated yield of 209.4.

We try to get a count every 15-18 miles and try to get at least one count in every county. Some routes will exceed 300 miles in a day and our route for tomorrow takes us north from Marysville to Bowling Green then due west to just north of Fort Wayne and we then drop south to Fishers, Indiana. This will be about 330 miles plus and will be a long day.