Every year, row crop farmers eagerly await news from the Pro Farmer Crop Tour, during which scouts travel thousands of miles and go into more than 2,000 fields in seven Midwestern states to gather first-hand data that is used it to predict yields. This year, however, there’s even more excitement surrounding the tour.
The latest WASDE report from the USDA forecasts record-breaking yields in five of those states —Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. Illinois could see an amazing average corn yield of 225 bu. per acre.
“On Crop Tour, we want to see what’s really out there,” says Pro Farmer editor Brian Grete on the latest edition of Unscripted, a new Farm Journal podcast. “We’re the first real hands-on look across the bulk of the Midwest.” During the tour, scouts pull approximately 1,700 samples and report their observations from four days of field study.
Unscripted hosts Clinton Griffiths and Tyne Morgan won’t be getting much sleep during the tour, as they’ll be broadcasting each night from four cities along the tour’s Eastern route. With sagging commodity prices, the mood among corn and soybean growers remains low, but generally good weather in much of the Midwest this season has helped produce healthy crops.
Grete notes that the lack of drought has been a key factor, as has a good balance of rain and sun. “Crops have had very little stress this year,” he says. “Now, we know about the flooding in the northwestern Corn Belt and that’s going to take away some harvested acres, but yield-wise what’s out there is very strong.”
Because Pro Farmer Crop Tour scouts are actually in the fields, the final forecasts tend to be more accurate. They’re not just relying on grower surveys and satellite images. Grete says that he does hear occasionally from ag industry people claiming that the tour’s scouts tend to cherry-pick the best-looking fields. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he says, adding that fields are picked at random. “I don’t care what a field looks like.”
Having led the eastern leg of the tour for 17 years, Grete is keeping his emotions in check about what this tour will reveal. “We don’t want to have any preconceived notions going into crop tour,” he explains. “But with that said, it’s impossible to ignore all the data that’s out there. Two-hundred and twenty-five for a corn yield would not just beat the current record of 214, it would absolutely annihilate it.”
