Just to keep it simple for now, I said 20% would get a 1/2 inch or more, not that only 20% would see rain. You can go out and pee on a corn plant if you want, and say you got rain, but it won't do a lot of good for maybe more than 20 minutes for the plant you personally watered. A quarter inch is not going to ensure a great crop from what I saw going through Iowa.
I did stop at Story City, IA for fuel when I drove up yesterday, and took a few minutes to go east of town to look at a couple of fields. I was far, far from impressed. 30" row beans, I could walk down and not have the leaves touch my legs. Right now - my estimate is somewhat less than 30 bu/ac. They were not good - they had only a few flowers, and not a lot of pods. And just barely knee high. The thing is - they looked like ALL the beans I saw along I 35 yesterday. I saw very, very fields canopied, even in 15 inch rows you could still see ground in lots of fields. It now August. Ya'll better hope it rains out of this next system. Right now, I don't have the enthusiasm for this production that some on here keep touting. I still agree with MT. If we get a frog strangler across the Midwest, we may have a chance at fairly good beans, but, from what I've seen and continue to see, 46 bu beans IS NOT in the cards.
And - has anyone happened to notice the 30 and 90 day forecasts? Hope you took my advice back in February (I think it was) about cutting back on the GDD's this year.
If all the crops I've seen looked like here, I would say, yes, we have a chance at those big yields being bragged up by the bears to pull the price down below cost of production. Oh, wait, that's right - we're probably already there. And where is the Dairy Farm MN man? He should be on here about now too trying to talk up the huge crop here in MN. Maybe we don't need those Maryland acres after all this year....
Jen
