Crop tour continues in the US...

There has been a lot of interest from our readers in the Pro Farmer Crop Tour in the US, so AgriLand decided to give some more details on how the tour works.

The tour takes place across seven states in the US – South Dakota; Ohio; Nebraska; Indiana; Iowa; Illinois; Indiana; and Minnesota.

Scouts – who travel to the fields taking measurements and samples – stop every 15 to 20 miles along different routes.

The scouts stop in both corn and soybean fields and do not enter fields with no trespassing signs. Many of the scouts are farmers themselves and take care when sampling crops.

The scouts follow guidelines on how to take samples so it is all done using the same method as outlined by the Farm Journal / Pro Farmer (below).

In each corn field:

Record crop district and county;
Go 35 paces into the field to start sampling;
Measure row spacing and record;
Measure a 30ft plot, then count all ears in two rows in the plot. Record total;
Pull the fifth, eighth and eleventh ear off one row of the plot;
Take corn ears back to the car;
Measure the length of the grain on each ear, average and record;
Count the kernel rows on each ear (will be an even number), average and record.

Corn yield is calculated roughly. The ear count (EC) is needed, which is the total number of ears counted in two 30ft rows.

The ear length (EL) is obtained by calculating the average length of the grain from three ear samples.

The average number of kernel rows (KR) around the ear from three ear samples is also counted and the row spacing (RS) is measured. The equation for calculating corn yield is outlined below.