From the Rows
Day 4 Western Leg
Chip Flory
Quick update from my route through central and southeastern Minnesota. We’ll get the numbers crunched and released during the live stream on agweb.com... check it out if you haven’t seen it. We’ll have the Iowa and Minnesota numbers and Brian Grete and I will share some impressions.
And my impression of the Minnesota corn crop is not good. It’s out of gas. Color is poor, ear size is suspect and the drowned-out areas are numerous. Those bare spots need to be accounted for at some point and that will likely be by way of a lower yield. You know what it’s like ... watch the yield monitor build a whole-field average, then hit an area with an exceptionally low yield. The whole-field average drops quickly and it is slow to climb back to the upside when you get back in the good corn. There are many Minnesota growers that will experience that this fall.
I split a route again today so I could get into Rochester to work on data and prep for tonight’s meeting. Denny and I pulled 8 samples with a low of 87 and a high of 203. The average from my route was 148 bu. per acre. As I said – the corn crop is out of gas... and by that I mean the crop shows a lot of nitrogen deficiency. We saw some disease but it wasn’t terrible. I was in one corn field that had enough weed pressure to impact ear size, but the biggest problem in the field was... you guessed it... nitrogen deficiency.
The bean crop on my route was equally unimpressive. Low pod counts that averaged just shy of 800 pods in a 3’X3’ square. Pods are also too flat... the bean crop has a lot of work to do to finish building bean size.
Again – check out the live stream from our final meeting in Rochester tonight.