The 2025 Pro Farmer Crop Tour is now in the books.It’s a week I look forward to every year once we get by The Fourth of July.This was my thirteenth Pro Farmer Crop Tour.All thirteen have been spent on the Western side of the Tour. The week just goes by so fast because of the schedule we keep for the week.We gather Sunday night to see all the veteran scouts but also to train newcomers that have not been a scout before. Many of us keep in contact throughout the whole year also, so it is fun to have us all together for 5 days once a year. And now we sit here on Thursday night with another great week behind us.
On day 4 we drive up into Minnesota and begin sampling as we work our way North and East finishing our day in Rochester.Today we covered Crop Districts 4,5,7,8, and 9. We were hoping to see a better crop than we saw last year as this year they had a much better growing season compared to last years all year long heavy rainfall.
My route every year samples counties in Districts 8 and 9.We pulled 20 soybean samples for the day.Our Soybean pod count in a 3x3 square averaged 1128 for the day, with a high of 1578 and a low of 332. This was 6 percent higher than our 2024 total of 1061 pods in a 3x3 square.Moisture this late into August usually makes for a strong finish for the soybean crop. The Minnesota crop has a lot less disease than we saw across the other states we sampled.We did see a little Sudden Death in our first few morning samples, but it was mainly in compacted areas or in end rows.
We also took 20 samples of corn on our route today.The corn crop certainly looked healthy from the road compared to what we had seen on the first three days of sampling.It proved to be just as good on the inside as it looked on the outside.Plant diseases were very minimal and the fields that did have a little disease pressure but just on the very bottom leaves.This crop is moving right along maturity wise as most ears were denting and a few had husks starting to turn white.Our 20 corn samples averaged 217 BPA, with a high of 277 BPA and a low of 1988 BPA.This compares to the 2024 corn yield of 171 BPA.This is the best corn crop I have ever seen in Minnesota.
Both crops in Minnesota have plenty of moisture to finish and neither seemed at risk of being hurt by a normal Frost date.I need to thank all of the scouts that worked their trails off again thisyear.A special thanks to all of our drivers this year as everyone again made it safely to Rochester from Sioux Falls.The final Pro Farmer yield numbers will be released to Pro Farmer subscribers on Friday at 1:30 PM CT.With the yield numbers published by USDA last week it will be interesting to see how the Crop Tour based Pro Farmer numbers will compare.