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.
Our route started in Missouri Valley north of Omaha, and covered Crop Districts 4 and 1. Our 21 corn samples had an average of 196.42 bpa, with a high of 242 and a low of 156. We sampled a solid corn crop today, but I am not sure it was good enough to have Iowa live up to a record 209 bpa corn crop. The Eastern Tour samples in Eastern Iowa, so we will see if that sheds some light tomorrow on where the Iowa corn crop will end up. I think the corn crop can finish out ok with the moisture we saw in the fields today. My only concern maturity wise is we had a lot of inconsistency in the ears within our samples today. Many samples would have two ears in full dent, but the third ear hadn’t even started to dent. I think they should finish ok as long as we have a normal frost date. I was a little concerned in the amount of Southern Rust we saw in our corn samples. Roughly half of the corn fields we walked into had obvious Rust on the leaves. I think it is late enough in this crop season to not cause a major yield reduction, but it may be something we have to monitor in the future.
Our route of soybeans also consisted of 21 samples, with an average 1182 pods in a 3x3 square. We had a high of 2124, and a low of 0. The 0 we pulled was in Woodbury County where the Summer flooding had killed many (many) acres of crop. This particular field had been replanted, but the plants were too young to have any pods on them. In the samples we pulled we didn’t see any evidence of White Mold or Sudden Death. We did see a few Aphids in the soybeans, but in the samples we pulled they were not near spraying threshold. However, as we ended our day and headed for Spencer we did see a sprayer Southeast of the town of George spraying a soybean field.
Tomorrow is our 4th and final day of the 2024 Crop Tour. We leave Spencer and head North and Northeast and work our 10 routes towards and ending up in Rochester. We’ve been very fortunate with the weather this week. We haven’ t had to sample in the rain this week and the temperatures have been in the 70’s and low 80’s. Tomorrow’s weather looks like more of the same.