Midwest Crop Tour – Day One

We arrived late Sunday night in Sioux Falls, South Dakota just in time for the meeting with all of the other tour participants.  With the flooding of the Missouri River near Omaha, we had to make several detours which probably added an hour to our drive.  The river looks like it has come down maybe a foot, but it is still very high.

We left Sioux Falls around 6:30 Monday morning and made a direct bee line to Sioux City, Iowa and crossed over the Missouri River there.  We took a sample in Dakota County which was in the 135 range and then moved into Dixon where we saw extensive hail damage from the storm of last Thursday.  Talking to some folks at the local convenience store, we noted that the storm took out a swath of about 5 miles by 100 miles and I know we saw about 25 square miles of this.  You would look at a bean field and all you saw was some light green stalks with no leaves or pods on them as far as you could see in the field.

We then motored another 30 miles or so west and then turned south for about 15 miles and then came back due east for about 40 miles.  In each County, we took a least one sample.  In about the fourth County, we got our first irrigated field sample and that ended up the best of the day at 230 bushels.

Bean samples were generally in the good range, however, there were several areas that we noted were extremely dry and if they do not get rain, the beans are in trouble.

We noted many areas where the stalks had been knocked over due to either wind or hail or both and all scouts noted hail damage in many of the fields.

Throwing out the high irrigated sample, our yield estimates ranged from a low of 102 to about 175 and compared to last year, our yields were down.  However, it appears that the call for South Dakota and Ohio is very much in line with the USDA estimates and tomorrow we will be finished with Nebraska and will have a better idea where we are at.

I tried to post during the drive, however, the cell service in Nebraska on our route was spotty at best and I could not get enough service to get my IPad to post to the site, so I will have to write a nightly recap of the trip.

However, I am tweating to Twitter (say that fast five times in a row) throughout the day at @farmcpa, so please follow me there.