The 2024 Pro Farmer Crop Tour has come to the end. It’s a week I look forward to every year once we get our own crops planted. The week just goes by so fast because of the schedule we keep for the week. Sunday night when we gather is always a great time, as many of us are here year after year. Some 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 drove up into Minnesota and began sampling as we worked our way North and East, finishing our day in Rochester. Today we covered Crop Districts 4,5,7,8 and 9. The corn and soybeans both suffered from excessive rainfall thru the whole growing season. My route started in Martin County and works north and east through Wantonwan, Blue Earth, Freeborn, Waseca, Rice and Goodhue counties. We knew that we would encounter many drowned out spots along our route, we just weren’t prepared for how many of those spots there were and the large size of many of them. The damage lasted thru the first 5 counties we sampled on the day. We had 20 samples on the day and fortunately didn’t encounter any zero yields on the day. However, two of our other scouts happened to be sampling in a flooded-out area and actually recorded a zero yield in the field they were in. When we stop in a field and walk past the end rows and then go 35 paces into the field—we never know what we are going to encounter. In the case of the two zero samples the scouts actually ended up in a completely flooded out area of the field. In this case we record a zero yield and we move on in our route to the next scheduled stop.
On our 20 corn samples for the day we ended up with an average of 169 bpa. This was 16 bpa less than the same area during the 2023 crop tour. Our high sample on the day was a 219 and our low on the day was 109. Some of our samples were about normal maturity, but because of late planting or because of replant we had a number of samples that were just in the blister stage. These fields are going to not have a first frost until well into October to reach the yield potential we recorded. We didn’t notice any major disease issues, but because of the excessive rainfall this area had we did see many fields that were showing definite nitrogen deficiency.
We also recorded 20 soybean samples on the day. Although the soybeans looked better from the road than the corn did, we weren’t able to find great soybean pod counts. Our average pod count on the day was 979 in a 3x3 square was almost identical to the 985 pods we had in 2023. However, 2023 was a very dry year and we hoped we would have a higher pod count this year. On the positive side we didn’t see much Sudden Death or White Mold to reduce to yield potential we recorded. Moisture in the fields seemed adequate to allow these soybeans to finish well if we have normal frost date.
Well, another Pro Farmer Crop Tour has ended. It’s a big undertaking we do every year the third week of August to get just under 100 scouts from Columbus Ohio and Sioux Falls South Dakota safely to Rochester Minnesota. I think we all made it again without incident. I need to again send out a special thanks to all of the scouts that attended and also to Our sponsors. Without the help of all these people Crop Tour would not exist.
For me, 2024 will go down as a very memorable year. It’s possible a few states may set record yields this year in both corn and soybeans. And being my 12th Crop Tour, this year will be remembered for the best weather I have ever sampled in. We had no rain on the week, and other than Monday being around 80 degrees for a high which is almost perfect sampling weather, the rest of the week was in the 70’s for high.