Day 3 of Crop Tour is our longest and most demanding day of the week. We cross over into Iowa first thing in the morning and cover the Iowa Counties west of I35 from Missouri North to the Minnesota border, ending the day in Spencer.
The corn crop we sampled today was much better than we saw the first two days of Crop Tour. Our route started in Missouri Valley north of Omaha and covered the western most Iowa counties North all the way to the Minnesota border. The corn crop was much healthier than we had anticipated starting out the day and didn’t disappoint as the day went on. We didn’t find any disease issues in our samples on the day, and only had a couple fields with light spider might issues. Our corn samples yielded an average of 176 bushels per acre. This was 9.5 percent less than 2021 but was still a solid crop considering the Spring planting delays that occurred, and the dry weather that the crop experienced in July. Our yield ranged from a low of 124 bpa and a high of 212 bpa. Harrison County was our highest yield, and our lowest was pulled in Plymouth County.
The soybean crop was also very solid. The crop had great color all day and was absent from any major disease issues. Maturity was about what we had expected, as we only had one sample on the day that had any flowers on it. The rest of the samples were all in pod fill, and we didn’t see the moisture issues we had seen on Monday and Tuesday. Our pod count in a 3x3 square averaged 1075, with a high of 2042 and a low of 504. The soybean crop in Western Iowa could use another rain, but certainly isn’t as desperate as the South Dakota and Nebraska crops are.
The important thing is we started the day with 40 scouts, and we all made it to Spencer. Tomorrow we move into Southwestern Minnesota and work our way to Rochester. I expect a very good crop tomorrow. The very Southwestern part of the State has been dry, but most of the area we are going to sample has had good precipitation and I expect a day of solid yields.