The John Deere Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour released its corn yield estimate and average soybean pod count for South Dakota and Ohio Monday night.

For Ohio, the eastern leg of the tour issued a corn yield estimate of 141.42 bushels per acre, up 15.1% from its 2005 estimate. The average soybean pod count for Ohio came in at 1346.2, up 1.2% from last year’s tour.

Pro Farmer editor Chip Flory said the tour’s corn yield estimate for Ohio is a bit larger than the increase projected by USDA in its most recent crop production report of August 11th. “USDA sees a crop that’s 12% better than a year ago; we saw a crop that was 15% better than a year ago,” Flory said. “It certainly suggests to me that maybe USDA’s got a little work to do over there to find just a couple more bushels in that Ohio corn crop.”

For South Dakota, the tour’s western leg issued a corn crop estimate of 95.97 bushels per acre, down 26% from its 2005 estimate. Flory, who leads the western leg of the tour, said the difference between corn in eastern South Dakota and western South Dakota is dramatic, with the dividing line being Highway 81. “81 is the cutoff line,” Flory said. “That crop on the eastern edge of the state really looked pretty good, but boy… once you get to Highway 81 the crop really goes downhill.”

The average soybean pod count for South Dakota came in at 922.79, down 8.9% from the tour’s 2005 estimate. But according to Flory, rains in the early part of August appear to have rescued South Dakota’s soybean crop. “Those August 1 rains really came just in the nick of time for that South Dakota crop,” said Flory, “and it looks to me like it’s going to be a pretty good crop.”

The western leg of the crop tour traveled from Sioux Falls, South Dakota all the way to Grand Island, Nebraska, Monday. Crop scouts at a Monday night meeting in Grand Island said Nebraska’s dryland corn generally looked better than expected, with irrigated corn looking about as good as expected. Crop scouts noted remarkably little disease or insect pressure in either dryland or irrigated Nebraska corn, and said the same appeared to be true for Nebraska soybeans, too.

The eastern leg of the John Deere Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour moves from Anderson, Indiana, through Illinois, ending Tuesday night in Bloomington, Illinois with a corn yield estimate and average soybean pod count for Indiana. The tour’s western leg travels from Grand Island, Nebraska, across the southern part of the state to Nebraska City, where tour officials will issue a corn yield estimate and average soybean pod count for Nebraska.

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