Our route happened to go through a lot of areas I have grown to know over the years. Starting near where I went to high school, going through where I lived as a child, then where family owns a farm and ending where I went to college (each less than 100 miles from where I live now), I was rather familiar with the landscape I was entering on day three. I am familiar with the potential this land can bring and I have had a lot of conversations with growers over the years from these areas. My knowledge of the area paired with expectations of a record crop left me looking to be impressed today — something that has been missing these past few days.
A couple of other tours have scouted throughout Illinois over the past couple of weeks, each yielding results below a year ago. While yields were good, they were not stellar. We expected to see persistent disease still in the corn crop and that is exactly what we found. Illinois brought more tar spot than we have seen the last couple of days along with some rust and northern leaf blight. Still, the plants looked green and grain fill was going along well — which could lead to some heavier ears if the plant remains somewhat healthy over the next month. The amount of disease seen calls a lot of that into question.
Variability has been persistent across most of the eastern routes thus far this Tour. That changed a bit today, but not in a good way. Disease was persistent all over western Illinois. Still, Illinois’s average Tour yield fell just shy of 200 bu. per acre. That was down 2.2% from a year-ago despite USDA anticipating a record 221 bu. per acre (up 1.8%). The Illinois crop has suffered from a persistently wet and hot year, which has led to heavy diseases over a significant portion of the state.
As our route went further west, disease pressure in soybeans became much more obvious. We saw a lot of sudden death the further west we went. That is not to say we saw a bad crop. Western Illinois still has a lot of potential on soybeans with overall Illinois pod counts coming in at a record 1479.22 pods in a 3x3 ft. square. Similar to what was seen in Indiana and Ohio, beans will need some moisture to utilize some of the potential evident in the significant number of pods. A high number of pods is not always indicative of a record yield — the weather will need to cooperate to finish the growing season as beans need to mature slowly, something sudden death is going to challenge.