Crop yield expectations fluctuate just like the weather has this growing season as farmers prepare for harvest.
In fact, some combines began rolling in recent weeks as U.S. farmers harvested 5% of corn as of Sept. 12, which was a point ahead of the average pace.
In Illinois, farmers harvested 1% of corn as of the same date, but not enough soybeans to register on USDA’s weekly crop progress report.
Stan Born, a farmer from Lovington in Moultrie County who serves as vice chairman of the U.S. Soybean Export Council (USSEC), plans to begin harvest as early as this week.
“We started (planting) about a month behind, then it turned quite dry,” Born said during a webinar hosted by USSEC. “Crop conditions struggled in June and early July. Corn was hurt a little bit but soybeans, while stressed, continue to look pretty good.
Variable yields expected as harvest begins
Stan Born
“My corn (yields) will probably be off the five-year average by 5 to 10%,” he noted. “Soybeans, I believe will be above the five-year average (of around 62 bushels per acre). I think there’s a chance we’ll be in the 70-bushel range this year.”
Other USSEC leaders look for variable yields on their farms as well.
“We had good rainfall and the beans were putting on a lot of pods, but then in August it stopped raining,” said Dawn Scheier, USSEC board member from South Dakota. “We’re really questioning what (soybean) yields will be. We’re thinking ours will be around 40 bushels, which would be below normal.”
The Scheier family had to replant about 500 acres of soybeans last spring after their farm was slammed by a powerful derecho storm, which featured windspeeds above 100 mph. They currently have no working on-farm bins to store this year’s crops due to storm damage.
“We normally store all our crops on farm before we take them to the elevator,” Scheier said. “It will be a challenging harvest on the trucking side of it.”
Brian Kemp, a USSEC board member from Iowa, planted his crops about 10 days to two weeks late this year and received just spotty rainfall throughout the summer.
“Yields in my neighborhood will be variable, even within the same fields just by soil type,” Kemp said. “We had 70% of normal rainfall throughout the summer.”
The various challenges this growing season prompted USDA to lower crop production expectations by 8% for corn and 1% for soybeans this month compared to the previous forecast.
“Even with the reduction, we’re still set up for a pretty good (soybean) crop,” said Mac Marshall, vice president of market intelligence for USSEC, who noted it would be the fourth-largest soy crop on record at 4.38 billion bushels. “We’re still growing productivity in the U.S. at a rate of .4 bushels per year.”
But, with smaller-than-expected crops and tighter stocks in the U.S. this year, South American production becomes even more important in the year ahead to meet global demand, according to Randy Mittelstaedt, head of market insights for R.J. O’Brien.
“Any kind of risk to the South American crops will be extremely important and could lead to extreme volatility in the soybean market moving forward,” said Mittelstaedt, who looks for Brazilian farmers to expand soybean area by about 5-6% this year.
In the U.S., he believes USDA’s predicted corn yield average of 172.5 bushels per acre may not change much this late in the season. But the average soybean yield estimate, 50.5 bushels, could grow in subsequent reports.
“Looking forward, the pod count numbers (in USDA’s crop assessments) do increase from September to the final report (in January) an average of 5%,” said Mittelstaedt.
USDA’s soy pod counts in the September crop report were the lowest since 2019, he added.
U.S. crop conditions heading into harvest were just 53% good to excellent for corn as of Sept. 12, down a point from the previous week and 5 points lower than last year, and 56% good to excellent for soybeans compared to 57% the previous week and at the same time last year.
By Daniel Grant FarmWeek
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