Day 2 was another great day for scouting. The morning started out comfortable and very wet again, and turned a little hot in the afternoon. We started the day in Grand Island and worked our way Southeast, ending the day in Nebraska City. The counties today extended from Grand Island East to the Missouri River and South to the Kansas border, encompassing crop districts 5, 6, 8 and 9.
After what we saw on Monday with the low crop yields and very dry conditions, we started the day with very low expectations for today’s crop. As it turned out we were mildly surprised by what we saw for crop potential in both the corn and soybeans today. The corn yields in the Irrigated corn was very good today. My particular route moving East out of Grand Island and turning South at York saw a healthy Corn crop with of high yield of 228 BPA. Nebraska had some major hail storms as usual this Summer. We ran into a field in York County that was just in the process of pollinating, and another field that had just finished pollinating. Those fields are going to need to avoid a frost into October to make it to maturity. The final average for corn in Nebraska ended up being 24 bushels less than last year, being drug down mostly from the dryland acres in the state.
With two days of soybean samples in the state completed, this crop might be the most susceptible to a weak finish. Most of the fields we sampled were showing obvious signs of extremely dry conditions. The soybeans looked white in the late morning and afternoon turning their leaves over to protect themselves. The pods are not filled out yet, with many of the sample plants having a few aborted pods . It is so dry we had difficulty pulling the plants out of the ground without breaking the stems off. The pod counts in a 3 x 3 square were down 13.3 percent from last year in our samples. This reduction could become much larger if Nebraska doesn’t catch a rain soon. This crop may look a whole different by Labor Day if the Non-irrigated areas don’t see some much needed rain soon.
Tomorrow, we move into Western Iowa, scouting the counties mainly West of I35 from The southern border north to Minnesota. A lot of questions about the Iowa crop should be answered tomorrow.