Day 2 was another beautiful day for scouting. The morning started out very wet and cool again, and the afternoon was again in the lower 80’s for highs. Day 2 is our shortest day of the week. We started the day in Grand Island and worked our way southeast, ending the day in Nebraska City. The counties today extended from Grand Island east to the Missouri River and south to the Kansas border, encompassing crop districts 5, 6, 8 and 9. Corn yields in the irrigated corn was very good today. My route moved East out of Grand Island and turned South at York – and we saw a healthy corn crop with exception of a couple of areas that had been hit by hail.
The 19 corn samples on my route averaged 172.5 BPA. The range was a high of 222.2 and a low of 64.3. The high was a sample in Saline County and the low was also pulled at the eastern edge of Saline County just east of the town of Wilber. The area between Wilber and Clatonia was an extremely dry area where the corn was completely brown and the ears were all hanging down. This area was a fairly small area as we had good corn samples 10 miles west of this area and also 10 miles east. The corn crop was mostly beginning to dent or well into the dent stage. With moisture in both the dryland fields and (of course) the irrigated fields, this area should be able to finish this corn crop strong barring any prolonged periods of extreme heat.
On the soybean side we also pulled 19 samples with an average of 1,086 pods in a 3’x3’ square. Our high was 1,794 pods and a low of 202 pods pulled in Saline County in the drought stricken area. This average compares closely to the 2023 average of 1133 pods in a 3’x3’ square. Even with the low pod count of 202 we felt the soybean crop was overall a good crop. Irrigators were running in most of the irrigated soybean fields (as is always the case for soybeans in August). Dryland soybeans were not currently under moisture stress but another rain in the next 7 to 10 days would certainly be beneficial to help them reach their full potential.
We did encounter an area this morning southeast of the town of Sutton about three miles that had been battered by hail sometime in the past month or so. As we moved around this area we found the damage to be about 5 miles wide and approximately 10 miles long. We didn’t pull any samples here as we had sampled just outside of the area, but we didn’t see any fields in this area that would warrant being harvested. Most of the fields had been disked down, with some having had a cover crop of Rye seeded into them. Tomorrow we move into western Iowa scouting the counties mainly west of I-35 from the southern border north to Minnesota, ending the day in Spencer. This area was some of the worst parts of Iowa affected by drought last year and having driven thru this area on our way to Sioux Falls on Sunday, we expect a much more normal crop this year.