Estimating yield
GREAT LAKES GRAIN PREDICTS 157 BUSHEL CORN AND 45 BUSHEL SOYBEANS
The results are in and according to Great Lakes Grain, farmers can expect corn to come in at 157 bushels per acre and soybeans to yield 45 bushels per acre within their trading area. These estimates come from an interim report published after more than two days of field walking, cob measuring and pod counting as part of the 2011 Crop Assessment Tour.
“Overall, if we can get that frost free period through to the first week of October, we’re get very close to that 150 corn mark in our trading area,” says Don Kabbes, marketing development manager with Great Lakes Grain. He emphasizes the importance of more growing time for the crop. “We believe that 60 percent of the corn was planted past May 14, we’ll see a lot of grade 4 and 5 corn with low test weight if we get an early frost.”
Although frost is a critical factor, Don was surprised by how far along June planted corn was. “That surprised everyone on the tour,” he says. According to their report, corn is in fill dent with the exception of two sites and it will need an additional 450 heat units to reach full maturity in most areas.
Collecting data
The crop tour consisted of 44 crop sales specialists and grain marketing staff from AGRIS Co-operative, Wanstead Farmers’ Co-operative, FS PARTNERS and Great Lakes Grain. Split onto two teams, the group was able to collect 2,560 corn yield observations and 1,920 soybean yield observations from 32 sites.
For their corn yield estimate, GLG used the following calculation: # of rows x length of the cob x population/90,000 = dry yield.
For soybeans, the following equation was used: population x # seeds per plant/33,000/60 =yield
Field observations
While out in the field, tour members were able to gather much more information than simply yield counts. Nitrogen deficiency and plant population challenges were the most common observations in the corn field while soybean fields showed damage from defoliating insects, sudden death syndrome and manganese deficiency in the southwest.
For full reports and more information are available at Great Lakes Grain website.
