From the Rows – Chip Flory, Western Leg
That started with a bang.
Scouts on the Western Leg of the 2026 Pro Farmer Crop Tour left Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Monday morning and headed north, south, east and west and every managed to find their way to Grand Island, Nebraska. Along the way, 94 corn fields were sampled and 93 soybean field were counted in South Dakota before scouts got a start on Nebraska by sampling areas east of Grand Island and north of the Platte River.
Disease pressure on the corn and soybean crops is much less than last year, but stress from mid-season heat, high nighttime temps and a lack of rain cut serious yield potential from what the Tour measured in 2025. But problems with the South Dakota corn crop started before the mid-summer stress. Ear populations in 60-foot of side-by-side 30-foot rows average 85.47 ears, down 5.9% from last year’s 90.84. And in many fields, barren stalks were the reason for the shortfall.
Mid-summer stress shows up in the length of grain per ear. This year scouts measured an average of 6.13 inches of grain, down 13.45% from last year’s 7.08 inches. The number of kernel rows around the ear busted the “lower-than” trend and came in at 16.41, up 2.46% from last year’s 16.02.
The end result is a calculated average yield of 149.09 bu. per acre, down 14.41% from last year’s 174.18. It looks like USDA got the trend right in the August Crop Production Report, but it looks like there might be room to trim a bit more from the South Dakota corn crop.
Scouts generally felt the bean crop handled the stress of this growing season better than corn. In reality, pod counts came in down 20.4% from last year at just 946 pods in a 3’X3’ square. But, compared to the three-year average, pod counts are down 12.07% - that’s still a hit but it’s not the magnitude of the decline from last year. It can be difficult to directly connect the dots of pod counts to yield, but there is clearly less of the bean-production factory up and running than we saw last year. Soil moisture is also well below levels observed last year and this year’s crop needs rain to realize its full potential.
None of that makes it a “bad” bean crop. As mentioned, disease pressure is light. There are exceptions to that, but scouts were not concerned that diseases will rob bushels late in the season. In fact, it’s like this year’s bean crop showed us how excellent last year’s bean crop was. This year’s bean crop in South Dakota might be average, but it’s not the crop was saw a year-ago.
Similar conditions were noted in corn and soybeans as scouts started field observations in Nebraska. We’ll wrap up Nebraska on Tuesday with an overnight stop in Nebraska City. The 2026 growing season south of the Platte River has been different than what we sampled today, but growers at the meeting in Grand Island tonight told us to expect a highly variable corn and soybean crops as we make our way from west to east. A couple of scouts from southeast Nebraska warned the rest of the team on Sunday night that we’ll run into some “burnt up” crops on Nebraska’s far-eastern border Tuesday.