08/21/23 Crop Scouting Begins

Pro Farmer is making its way in its annual crop scouting venture across the central Midwest evaluating crops this week. They will be sweating as temps rise from what had been an August period of pleasant conditions to now sweltering. My expectations are that they will find extremely variable corn yields while the soybean pod count is a bit short. The forecast suggests this heat wave will be severe enough to add some stress degree days and last 10 days but September may be warmer than normal too. That would not be a good end of the season for crops still in drought. A crop scouting group evaluated our farms on August 15th. The first exclamation heard from them when entering the fields was…”hey, it’s muddy.” That is not usually the case here in NW IA in mid-August. More often there are dry cracks in the ground. There was no sign of any stress from lack of moisture. We had received an inch of rain every week on average since May on our farms. It did not rain for a couple weeks but then we got 3 ½ inches. We have been the unusual garden spot. We went into this…