As Pro Farmer Crop Tour sets out on Monday, UDSA’s latest crop projection shows scouts could not only see a record corn crop but a record by a long-shot. USDA’s August crop production report released Tuesday shocked the market, not only because of the large increase in projected yield but the surprising increase in planted acreage.
Based on farmer survey results, as well as NDVI imagery, USDA now projects the national corn yield to reach 188.8 bu. per acre, which would shatter the previous record. And for planted acreage, USDA shocked the market with a 2.1 million increase in corn, now estimates at 97.3 million acres.
USDA doesn’t survey actual fields until next month, which means Pro Farmer Crop Tour is the first time scouts, across a wide geography, will actually step into fields and see if the crop is as good as it looks from the road. And considering the talk of pollination problems and disease pressure this year, that’s a vital piece of estimating yields, as NDVI data might not tell the whole story. Together, the seven states that make up the Tour account for about 70% of our nation’s corn and soybean production.
Pro Farmer Crop Tour also stays consistent in its methodology, as it always happens the third week of August and scouts travel the same routes every year across seven states, using the same sampling procedure in every field.
“AgriTalk’s” Chip Flory will lead the western leg of Pro Farmer Crop Tour again this week. He says the most important piece of data is ear count. However, it’s also important when you analyze the data each day to not compare it to USDA’s August estimate. He says you need to analyze that data and compare it to Crop Tour results from the previous years.
“Look at the trends, No. 1, from one year to the next,” Flory says. “And I’m not talking about comparing what we find on crop tour to last year’s final on a state by state from USDA. Compare the results from this year’s Crop Tour to the results that we had from last year Crop Tour. If you do that and look at it on a percentage basis, that’s where you find the value in the numbers that we generate. We’re pulling 1,600 to 1,700 corn samples and 1,600 to 1,700 soybean pod counts. And when you do that from one big field from Ohio to Nebraska, the numbers start to make sense.”
It’s also important to remember Crop Tour is a fact-finding mission with a goal of getting a strong, objective view of corn yield potential from one big field across the seven states we sample during the third full week of August.
What is the methodology behind the Pro Farmer Crop Tour? Watch below.
