Details on the Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour process

Brian

Grete: And it all comes down to this. Two on, two out, bottom of the ninth. The Farmers lead by one. Full count, here comes the play at the plate, and it's the Ag View Pitch!

Chris

Barron: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Ag View Pitch, and today we have a special report here that we want to get to everybody on the Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour, and we've got Brian Grady with us who leads the eastern leg. And so Brian, go ahead and introduce yourself and, and kind of got a few questions for you on the crop tour.

Brian

Grete: Sure thing, Chris. Thanks for having me on. Glad to talk to all you on the crop tour and the process we go through. Like Chris mentioned, my name is Brian Grady. I'm the editor at Pro Farmer. And I'm the eastern leg leader of the Midwest Crop Tour. So I will be in charge of the scouts that go through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, eastern half of Iowa, and then southeastern Minnesota. We join up with the western leg, which goes through southeast South Dakota, Nebraska, western Iowa, and then southern Minnesota, and we meet up at Rochester on next Thursday.

Chris

Barron: Great. You guys have what, about 20 routes between the, the east and the west?

Brian

Grete: Yeah, there are 12 Eastern routes and they're dedicated. These are the same routes every year, so there are 12 on the, the East and 10 on the West, so 22 of those dedicated routes. Some of them, because of high participation, if we have enough drivers, we split them, and so you might have 2 vehicles on the same route. They don't sample in the same areas. They either— they usually split them half and half., and, you know, it makes their job easier in any given day. Not all the routes are split because we don't have enough drivers for all that to happen every year, and it kind of depends on the numbers year to year.

Chris

Barron: Right. Can you talk a little bit about— I know there's some questions out there on and with regard to how you do the sampling. Can you, can you kind of run us through that?

Brian

Grete: Yeah, so those along those designated routes, we instruct the the drivers to stop about every 15 miles randomly. And once they've determined where they're going to stop, we take both the corn and soybean sample at the same time. They can be adjacent to each other across the road, whatever the case may be, but we do like to take both the corn and soybean sample at the same time. So in the cornfield, we go past the end rows, and then we go another 35 paces into the field. So you're in a random spot that you don't, know what it's going to look like when you're at the road. You know, how far you're into the field depends on how many end rows are planted. So some of the fields you can get quite a ways into them, others, you know, you're not as far.

But what we do is, you know, we don't go in on the corners, we go in, in the middle of the field and that, that type of thing to, to get away from some of those compaction issues and everything else that happens in the fields. Once we've gone past the end rows and our 35 paces in, we lay out 2 30-foot of row and we count all the ears in that 30-foot of row. From one of those rows, we pull ears number 5, 8, and 11. And so we have 3 sample ears coming out of the field. On those, we measure the grain length in inches to the nearest quarter inch. We measure the kernel rows around. And then the formula that we use that plugs in for— kicks out our yield is the total number of ears in those rows times 0.5 times your average grain length times your average kernel rows divided by your row width, and that'll kick out a yield for you out of that field.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, John, the soybeans, how does the process work?

Brian

Grete: Well, we don't go as far into the soybean field. We find a representative spot, so we look over the field and, and you know, if it's pretty uniform, you don't have to go a long ways in. You just want to get off the end. So once again, the compaction stuff, you mark out 3 foot of row and you count the number of plants in that 3-foot area, and then you randomly pick 3 plants from that row, whether they be the first 3, the first middle one, and an end one. However, we let the scouts determine that on their own, and that's all part of the randomness of it as well, because everybody does it just a little bit differently. But you, you pull those 3 plants off, you count the number of pods on them on all 3 plants and you average it up. And so what we do, the formula there is the number of plants times the average number of pods gives you plants or pods in a 3-foot row.

And then you take that times 36 and divided by your row spacing and And that, that makes it so that everything is equal on a 3-foot by 3-foot square, no matter what the row spacing is— 7.5 inches, 30 inches, whatever the case may be. It gives it apples-to-apples comparison there, right?

Chris

Barron: And then you also look at the moisture. Do you—

Brian

Grete: can you talk about that? Moisture is one of the things that we record when we come out of the field. Plant health, in corn is one of the factors that's also involved there. You know, and the moisture is especially critical in terms of the soybean plant, because we know that the more moisture it has in the third full week of August as we're going through on crop tour, the better chance it has to finish and finish strong. You know, a year like this where the crop's going to be way more immature than what it is in a normal year, there are obviously going to be some challenges. We're going to be into fields that are just flowering. And in that case, on soybeans, what we would do is if it has flowers, but it doesn't have any pods, and we count every pod that's a quarter inch or bigger.

And so, you know, if we're in a field that's fully flowered, we record the stage as flowering, but it might not have any pods, and that one would actually go down as a zero. Every other category would have a measurement in it, obviously, but there would be no pods. Likewise, if we're in a field that's fully potted and doesn't have any flowers, that goes into the maturity rating that we have along with the moisture rating. So those are the two primary ratings that we take on the soybean crop.

Chris

Barron: Right now on the immaturity of the corn, if you've got a field that's, say, just, just tasseling or just pollinating, you'd probably pass on that one and catch the next one, or how would that work?

Brian

Grete: Yes, so we will instruct the scouts that in a year like this when we may have fields that aren't yet tasseled, we're not going to sample those. There's actually nothing to sample out of that field from what we take as measurements. So that, you know, there is no sample on something like that. If it is just pollinated, you know, we're, we're going to probably move on to another field where we can get some actual data out of it. So they'll be all be instructed on that ahead of time. We'll, we'll do it with the same method, eastern leg of the belt or the tour and the western leg both. So like I said, that'll all be instructed on the Sunday evening meeting that we have before we kick off, right?

Chris

Barron: And your routes are all the same routes historically, but everybody has a random stop, if they happen to stop at that, in that random place, and there are prevent plant acres every place they look, then, then they would just drive on until they get to a corn and soybean field. Is that correct?

Brian

Grete: That is correct, Chris. We don't care about prevent plant acres. We're not— there's no way to measure them, you know, and they're not gonna be harvested for grain. So from NASA's perspective, they don't count anyway. I've gotten a ton of questions this week. I mean, so many I can't even tell you the number that asked me about what are you going to do about prevent plant acres, and it doesn't matter. They're, they're out of the equation. I mean, it's a— that's a novelty at this point in time. It's 11.2 million acres as of August. But not all the acres that were claimed as prevent plant under corn were intended for corn. You know, that's a whole nother discussion. But you know, for insurance purposes, guys maxed out their corn acres on prevent plant. Doesn't mean that they ever intended to plant corn on there.

It was, you can claim up to the maximum number of corn acres you planted over the past 4 years. So that, but we don't, we're not interested in prevent plant, we will not sample any. And you know, if at 15 miles, you don't have anything to sample, You go until you find something that you can sample. So maybe our sample counts will be down in some of those areas. I suspect they will. Northwest Ohio, some of northern Indiana, northern Illinois, some of those routes that we probably will get, you know, say if they would have made 16 samples along that route, maybe they're going to come in 2, 3, 4 shy of that. But that'll also be noted. We have a notes section. When we input the data, and that'll all be noted in there as well. And they'll be instructed on that along those lines to make sure that they give us notations.

Chris

Barron: Well, in fairness too, on, on at the end of the tour, when you guys go through to do your calculations, you take those acres into account when you come up with your final yield and your acres and that kind of on the report anyway.

Brian

Grete: Definitely, that, that's a good point. So Monday through Thursday next week is crop tour data. That's in the fields, pull your sample, come up with the data out of that field, put it into the spreadsheet. And at the end of the night, we calculate the average for that particular state. That's, that's CropTour data. There, there, it's objective. There's nothing subjective about it at all. It's pure measurements. On Friday at 1:30 Central Time, Pro Farmer will release our national corn and soybean crop estimates. And that takes into account the crop tour data that we gathered Monday through Thursday. But it also takes into account in a year like this crop maturity, soil moisture, areas outside of where we sampled on crop tour, weather, how we think the crop's going to finish, all those types of things and many factors.

And that's why the numbers on a state-to-state basis will in all likelihood be different than the numbers that you hear coming out of Crop Tour Monday through Thursday, because we put our analysis on it, our spin on it, our perspective on it, and come up with what we think the state level numbers will be in from those 7 states and across the nation.

Chris

Barron: Right. And that's excellent clarification too, because I think sometimes there's a little confusion on what you guys are doing on the 4 days when you're actually in the field. You know, pulling those samples and getting that data versus what you guys do when you assemble that data with all the other documentation and information that you have to come up with the, with the final numbers that you do. With that, on Friday is when you release that. When is that released and what is released? What specific data do you release at that time?

Brian

Grete: Yeah, so that'll be the national corn and soybean production and yield estimates from Pro Farmer. We will— that's at 1:30 Central Time, like I said, and the corn number will have a plus or minus 1% on it. The soybean number will have a plus or minus 2% on it. And, you know, it's difficult in any given year to estimate crops in the third full week of August. It's especially difficult this year. And we know those challenges as we head out into fields here. But it is what it is. It's a process. It's a process that we have done for 26 previous years. This will be our 27th. And it's a process that has remained consistent in both methodology and the timing of it being the third full week of August every year. It so happens that this year we are the first objective field data coming out of the fields because USDA had done away with their August objective yield data.

They based their August estimates on farmer surveys and satellite imagery. And so we are the first boots on the ground, ground truthing coming out of the fields, and that'll make it unique unto itself this year.

Chris

Barron: Right. And you use the word objective yield data. The one thing having gone with— and I personally went with you, rode out there with you a couple of the years and had the privilege, I guess, of getting to go along on the crop tour at that time. And one of the things you made a point of, and I'm sure you guys still do, is that we're going into this without an opinion. We're going here to find out what, what's out there. And I think that's real important that people understand that. Any, any comments on that point?

Brian

Grete: Yeah, definitely. We, we don't go in with any preconceived notions in terms of what crop size is. You know, I've heard a lot of comments this week about Well, I hope your numbers are better than USDA's. Speak to that on two fronts. One, that it kind of implies that USDA is making up the numbers and they aren't. I guarantee, I know those guys personally. And I know that they, they have no interest in or would never want to make up the numbers. Their numbers are what they are. And in this case, it was mostly farmer surveys. So the farmer told them 169.5 bushels per acre is what they expected to get on average. From those surveys. But the other thing, you know, on that is we're not interested in whether our numbers are similar to USDA's or not similar to USDA's. In all honesty, they are what they are. They're our numbers. And I couldn't care less what USDA's number was.

I know, I know it. I mean, there's no way of not knowing what it is because of my job and doing this day in and day out. But If we come in and our number is 169.5, it's pure coincidence. If we come in and it's higher than that, that's what we found out there. And that's what we interpreted it to be. If it comes in lower than that, the same thing, that's, that's what we found. And that's what we interpreted it to be. At the end of the week, Pro Farmer is going to give you the honest-to-God true number that we feel will be the final production and yield. And like I said, any year that's a challenge in the third week of August. This year, it's especially challenging because of the immaturity of the crop. But, you know, with that said, it's still the process that we have to go through. And, you know, we— some years we get really close. Last year, we were very, very close.

We had a much more mature crop. And we do know that, especially on corn, our formula works better in years when there's more maturity. This year that makes it even more of a challenge, obviously.

Chris

Barron: Right, is there any, you know, you've done a great job of explaining, you know, the process. I think answered a lot of the questions that a lot of, a lot of growers have had that we've heard anyway, and I'm sure that you've heard. Is there anything that we haven't hit on that, that you think is important that the listeners need to be aware of?

Brian

Grete: You know, probably the, the biggest misconception out there is that we just look for the the really good fields or the really poor fields or whatever. Nothing could be further from the truth, to be honest with you. If you ride in my vehicle, you know, I keep track of the mileage, obviously, and I try to stop every 15 miles pretty religiously. If I, if I'm able to, if I'm in the middle of a town or something like that, then I don't, obviously, because there's nothing to sample there. But, you know, And I'll say, okay, we're at 12 miles. So within the next 3 miles, I want to make a stop. We're going to take the first county road to the north, and then we're going to take the next county road to the west, and we'll take the first corn-soybean sample we find after we make that turn. And so it's predetermined ahead of time.

A classic example of that is in 2012, I had a TV guy from the Twin Cities was going to meet me in Clear Lake. Iowa on I-35. And so we met there at the culverts and I said, okay, we're going to go back on 35. We're going to take the first exit to the right. We're going to go north. We're, you know, whatever the coordinates were that I came up in my head ahead of time. And we pull up to this field and I had 2012, mind you, it's the drought year, the drought of historic droughts. And I had gone through and I had taken a lot of samples that were single digits and double, you know, low double digits out of prime farmland in central Illinois. But I had not had a zero at that point. The field I pulled up to, you could see straight through it. There was nothing but stalks. There were absolutely no ears on that field. And I thought, oh my gosh, I got the TV guy with me.

And here we are at a zero field and he jumps out and he knew nothing. I mean, he knew nothing about what a field was basically. He goes, oh my God, look at that. Field of corn. I go, that's a zero. There's nothing there. And he goes, what are you talking about? I go, there's no ears. You can see from one end of the field to the other. And so he did his camera shot or whatever. And I said, you know, let's, let's go get another field where we can actually pull a sample from. So you got some video to shoot besides, you know, a field that has no ears on it. And so we went a ways down the road and, you know, we pulled up to a field and I said, okay, you know, this one has ears. And we went in and did the thing and he's like, oh my gosh, yeah, this looks great compared to that other field. But when he went into the first one, he thought, he thought it was a great field of corn.

He had no idea what he was doing. But I mean, that's kind of the randomness of it. And you know how stuff can happen. I mean, those fields weren't more than 15 miles apart. And in 2012, one of them happened to get a rain and was a decent field. The other one had nothing.

Chris

Barron: Well, and to your point, you know, you pull up to those fields, you're in the middle of the field, you walk through the end rows, you do your 35 paces, you might end up in the best part in the field, it might be a medium part of the field, or it might be a drowned out area. So, you know, that's the randomness of it. And then you replicate that with, you know, with 20 routes over and over and over and over again. That's what creates the randomness of it.

Brian

Grete: Yes, and those holes, we will hit those this year. There's no doubt. Drownout spots are going to be pretty prevalent in some of these areas. So when we pace into a field, if it's a field full of holes and we pace in and we hit our spot and it happens to have a— be a plush area, we still record it as that even though there's holes all around us, right? Vice versa, if we were in a pretty good-looking field from the road and we pace in and it's a drownout spot, It's going to be what's recorded. If in that 30-foot there's no, no stalks and no ears, it's a zero, even if there's going to be plenty of grain all around it. So, and that's the randomness. And that's, that's why when we come out of any given field, it's going to give us a number because that's the process. But that doesn't mean that that's necessarily what that field will yield.

And that's why at the end of the week when we've pulled 1,400 corn samples, the best number that we have is the average of all 1,400 corn samples.

Chris

Barron: Exactly.

Brian

Grete: Because that makes it one big cornfield from eastern South Dakota to western Ohio and everywhere in between. And that gives us the best number that we have by far.

Chris

Barron: Right. Now you've done an excellent, excellent job of explaining. This should answer a huge amount of questions. Is there any other things that we haven't talked about you can think of?

Brian

Grete: Oh, you know, I think the immaturity of the crop has been a big one. The question on PP acres, I touched on both of those. Those have been really the ones that, you know, just dozens and dozens of phone calls, emails, texts, social media interactions, and those types of things that we face. Like I said, we know, we know the challenges in front of us. It doesn't— the challenges don't scare us. The, you know, we were pretty comfortable knowing that there's going to be a miss this year. We just honestly, we're going to try to get it as close as we can. And that's the process. So, you know, I encourage everybody to follow along through the week and, you know, know that that Monday through Thursday is objective data coming out. The numbers you hear from Pro Farmer on Friday are objective data. Plus other factors.

Chris

Barron: Right. And to that point, then where do you recommend— what's the best place to follow along?

Brian

Grete: Well, profarmer.com is going to have the most information. There's some exclusive stuff there for Pro Farmer members that nobody else gets. The general data is on agweb.com as well. And you'll be able to get all the state-level data there. It's just that you'll get a few additional route insights and daily insights and stuff like that on profarmer.com for those that are Pro Farmer members.

Chris

Barron: Awesome. And a lot of the media will be carrying a lot of the local media as you guys travel through certain areas as well too.

Brian

Grete: So definitely, and AgriTalk with Chip Flory, though, he'll have 2 hours worth in the morning at 10:06 Central Time and 2:06 PM Central Time. So there'll be 2 hours dedicated as well to Crop Tour. You can turn on basically any ag radio station across the Midwest and hear my voice. Or Jeff Wilson's voice. He's the leader of the western leg of the tour. And, and then the nightly meetings that we hold at our stops across the Corn Belt.

Chris

Barron: Great. And one other thing I want to say, and you can just tag on to this and we'll kind of wrap things up, but just make sure— and I know you guys do a great job of this, but, you know, having to get to go on that for a couple of different years, It's a lot of hard work. It can be really hot. It can be really wet. It can be really muddy, which would be awesome, but that may not happen. There's really long days and just make sure you guys stay safe. You guys are out on the road with all those routes and, you know, 100+ people. And so, you know, on behalf of the producers, we thank you for what you guys do because You know, if you haven't gone on the tour, for anybody listening, I recommend it at some point. I think, you know, for a producer especially to go on it, it really opens your eyes as to what you guys are doing and the information that you bring to us.

And Brian, we really appreciate all that you guys do.

Brian

Grete: Yeah, Chris, thank you. I appreciate the good words. And like you said, safety is first and foremost. I mean, we're out there gathering data, but Our primary goal, and you know this, I say it in the meeting every year, the introductory meeting, but, uh, be safe. The driver's number one job is to get 3 other individuals and himself or herself, uh, safely from point A to point B 4 different times, uh, through the week. And so the safety is the important thing for us.

Chris

Barron: That's right. So, well, thanks a lot, Brian. And, um, we'll probably try to hook up with you, like I mentioned to you offline, maybe a couple of days into the following week after the dust settles a little bit. Maybe we'll title it "The Dust Has Settled" from the Pro Farmer Crop Tour, and we can have a little conversation on just kind of wrapping things up. And I know you guys do a great job of that as well, so recommend everybody staying in tune with the profarmer.com and AgWeb. And, and thanks a lot, Brian. We really appreciate your time today.

Brian

Grete: You bet, Chris. Thank you.

Chris

Barron: All right, thanks everybody for listening today., and we will catch you again the next time on the Ag View Pitch.

Brian

Grete: Thanks. Thanks for joining us on today's episode of the Ag View Pitch. As always, you can reach out to us at cbarron@agviewsolutions.com or duanel@netins.net. We'll catch you next time on the Ag View Pitch.