Crop tour visits Bloomington

BLOOMINGTON – This week’s Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour showed a great corn crop in Ohio, but conditions were more variable as scouts approached Indiana and Illinois.

Those findings were shared during a tour stop in Bloomington Tuesday night. Tour participant Doug Miller of northern Iowa traveled across Vermilion, Champaign, McLean and Ford counties and came up with decent corn and soybean yields in those areas.

“They were in the low 200s and we had some 230,” Miller explained. “The pod counts on the beans were real good.”

Miller’s high from the eastern part of Illinois was around 236. He farms in Iowa where they experienced plenty of wet weather this year resulting in issues with the corn crop. Miller expects Iowa’s harvest to be slightly behind Illinois.

Chris Hawthorn, a national corn commodity statistician for USDA-NASS also participated in this year’s tour. He says the Ohio crop is in line with USDA forecasts but more variability was observed throughout Indiana and parts of Illinois.

During Tuesday’s meeting in Bloomington, Pro Farmer revealed an estimated yield of 182.3 for Indiana, which is up 6.5 percent from last year’s tour. Ear counts were up 7.3 percent and grain length was down. The pod count was up around 11.4 percent. The Nebraska corn yield was 179.17, up 8.3 percent from the 2017 estimate with pod counts up almost 15 percent. Illinois numbers are expected to be released Wednesday evening.