Death comes to us all. Life's but a walking shadow | We all know that the PFT is basically a PR stunt designed to generate interest in Agweb & company but if they are going to go to all the trouble to do it, the least they could do is, do a proper job of routing the tour. They sampled district 9 forty six times, district 6 twenty seven times and district 5 only once. Below is a table showing SD acres harvested for corn grain in 2016 by ag district. It's obvious that they grossly oversampled district 9 and to some extent district 6, undersampled district 5 and completely ignored districts 2 & 3 which have 40% of the crop and some of the dryest crop weather.
I know that SD is a big state but in the time they wasted oversampling district 9 they could have sent a car up north and pulled at least a few samples from districts 2 & 3. It would have added tremendous credence to their results.
My other criticism of these results is that they never include any measure of the variability of the samples. I know this isn't suppose to be a statistical survey but if they had included a high & low or a simple % standard deviation , something that a spreadsheet can kick out easily, it would add a lot to the numbers. It's as if they want to dumb the results down so much to make them simple that they make them worthless.
There is more than enough confusion and misleading information swirling around the market as it is, publishing more misleading information isn't going to help the situation. As a "news organization" they should be trying to clarify the situation not make it worse.
Edited by 1234 8/22/2017 08:05
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USDA and PFT
