By Katie Micik
DTN Markets Editor
OMAHA (DTN) -- The Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour's organizers tout the 30,000-mile scouting trip across the Midwest as a discovery mission, emphasizing state yields and the big picture.
This year, focus on the tour will be sharp.
"Wednesday's controversial crop estimates from USDA set the stage for plenty of attention on this year's Pro Farmer tour as everybody wants to know if USDA's large estimated corn and soybean yields can actually be validated out in the fields," DTN Analyst Todd Hultman said.
USDA forecast a national average corn yield of 168.8 bushels per acre earlier this week, increasing estimated production when most analysts had projected a decline. On soybeans, USDA pegged the yield higher, at 46.9 bpa versus expectations of 44.6 bpa.
Tour organizer and Pro Farmer editor Chip Flory said social media has shortened the link between scouts on the tour and market participants.
"I think there is that risk, and it's an increased risk, that the tour is going to influence the market on any given day," Flory said, emphasizing that's not the tour's goal. The object of the scouting is to take objective measurements and give perspective on yield potential.
"We let the tour be what it is, and that's a discovery process," Flory said. "We go out, and I learn something new and see something that I didn't expect to see, every day, multiple times a day. You've got to let it happen."
Pro Farmer has been organizing the tour since 1993 -- the organized scouting trip has been going on much longer than that -- and scouts travel the same 22 routes every year. Consistency is what gives the tour's data its merit, Flory said.
"Then when everything is said and done, trust the numbers for what they are. And of course you've got to look at how it compares to a year ago, how it compares to the three-year average and not get too wound up in individual samples, in county samples or even individual crop district samples. It's really the state number that matters."
Tour participants will gather for the eastern leg of the tour in Columbus, Ohio, while scouts on the western leg of the tour will convene in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Sunday with scouting beginning Monday morning.
On the eastern leg, scouts will fan out from Columbus and move west, ending the day in Fishers, Indiana. They'll continue to push west and north to Bloomington, Illinois, on Tuesday and Iowa City, Iowa, on Wednesday before meeting up with western leg scouts in Rochester, Minnesota, on Thursday.
Scouts on the western leg will scout South Dakota and parts of Nebraska on Monday and end the day in Grand Island, Nebraska. They'll push east to Nebraska City, Nebraska, on Tuesday and then to Spencer, Iowa, on Wednesday. On Thursday, they'll scout fields in Minnesota, which is widely believed to be one of the garden spots this year, before finishing the tour in Rochester.
DIVIDED EXPECTATIONS
"I think I'd have to go back to 1993 to find another year when the conditions were so variable or when the divide between the good and the bad is as wide as what it is this year," Flory said.
In the Flood Year, as 1993 is referred to, crops to the east of the Mississippi River impressed, but the story drastically changed when scouts crossed the river.
The roles are reversed this year, but Flory said the dividing line between the good and the ugly doesn't have a clear landmark, though it'll likely be somewhere in eastern Illinois.
"On the eastern tour, the experience is going to be pretty eye-opening on just how the variable weather can impact yield potential out there," he said, referring to June's record-setting wetness in parts of the Eastern Corn Belt.
Scouts will be looking closely at the number of ears, kernel rows around and kernel depth in fields across Ohio, Indiana and Illinois to gauge yield potential and to compare to USDA's yield estimates.
On corn, scouts walk past the end rows and count out 35 steps to determine where their sample begins. If, after 35 steps, they're in a ponded-out spot or area that won't make ears, the field goes into the data set as a zero.
Scouts then count all the ears in 30 feet of two side-by-side rows. They pull the fifth, eighth and 11th ears to count and measure. They plug the data into a formula to estimate yield. For more on how to scout and estimate yields on your farm, please see the Crop Production blog.
"Much attention will be focused on the Eastern Corn Belt after they endured flooding and record rainfall amounts earlier this summer," Hultman said. "Just as interesting, though, the Western Corn Belt has a lot to live up to with USDA promising average corn yields of 187, 184 and 183 bushels an acre in Nebraska, Minnesota and Iowa respectively."
Kyle Wendland, who farms with his father-in-law in South Dakota and on his own in northeast Iowa, said scouts could see a few surprises on the western leg.
He scouted one field in South Dakota that looked "absolutely awesome. Plant heath was great. I walked in, and it had pollination issues, about 1 to 2 inches just didn't pollinate. So for ideal moisture and ideal weather during pollination, to still see problems like that really surprised me."
Flory said there are a lot of unknowns about southeast Nebraska, which also got a lot of rain during June. He expects to see a more variable crop in southeast Iowa, an area the tour will visit on the third day of scouting.
"But then on Day 4 for the western leg, we should see really, really good yield potential in Minnesota," he said. "We're going out to see just how good it is."
Overall, Flory thinks scouts will see few issues with the corn crop's maturity, except for a few fields in the Eastern Corn Belt.
"I think we're going to be looking at a crop -- if this weather forecast verifies -- that could be going through some changes. The corn crop builds its yield in July, but it's got to hold on to it in August," Flory said. "If this weather forecast verifies, we'll be looking for signs that maybe this thing is taking a step back on ear fill, kernel depth, stuff like that."
BEANS: BIN BUSTER?
Scouts are going to be on the lookout for diseases and insects in this year's soybean crop, Flory said. Soybean sudden death syndrome and white mold top the list.
Farmers talked a lot about not putting money into their bean crops this year, but "the June-July rally changed a lot of attitudes on that. But there are still some guys out there that probably did not do all the crop protection that they needed to do to hold onto yield."
USDA's latest Crop Production report estimates soybeans would average 56 bpa in Nebraska, 53 bpa in Illinois and 52 bpa in Iowa. Of the states the tour covers, USDA's lowest yield estimate is South Dakota at 45 bpa.
The crop tour doesn't estimate soybean yields because rainfall in August plays such a large role in determining final output. Instead, the tour estimates the number of pods in a 3-foot by 3-foot square to estimate each field's potential.
Scouts count all of the plants in a 3-foot section of a row. They count the number of pods on three random plants and average them to come up with an estimate of the number of pods per plant. Then they put the data into a formula that calculates the number of pods in a 3-foot by 3-foot square.
"A lot of people have been commenting on where (beans) got in in decent time, they're big, bushy beans. But that doesn't necessarily equate to yield," Wendland said. His Iowa farm's missed some of the recent rains, and the extra vegetation is emphasizing the stress.
Hultman said he doesn't tend to put too much weight into crop tour results because of their relatively small sample size, "but I have to say that this year's Pro Farmer tour will be especially interesting because it will either give us confirmation that USDA did its job correctly in August or it will call USDA's bluff. I consider it a meaningful sample of USDA's sample."
Editor's note: Scouting for the tour begins on Monday morning. You can follow the tour's progress by following @KatieMDTN for eastern leg updates, @PamSmithDTN for western leg updates or the hashtag #pftour15. Please remember that each tweet represents only what's seen on that particular car's route and doesn't necessarily represent the big picture.
Watch DTN Ag News at midday for updates and in the evening when the state average yields are updated.
Katie Micik can be reached at katie.micik@dtn.com
(PS/AG/SK)
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