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Southwest Iowa | I think we’ve been told and figured out the past few years the people responsible for figuring out and determining the crop condition scores. If I understand correctly, it’s usually a FSA worker that observes the crop in their neighborhood while on the way to work, running errands, etc..
I wonder how accurate it is to compare the year to year numbers when we don’t know the number of people that are possibly new to the game on any given year. For example, let’s say this year, out of 100 people that are reporting this data, let’s say that 10 of them are new. They replaced 10 people that retired. How are we to know that these new 10 people are “seeing” what the old 10 saw? Another example, let’s say in the past 10 years, there’s 40 new people. So since the year 2010 until now, there’s only 60 of the same people reporting the scores for those 10 years. If those 40 new people have their scores +/- 5%, that could make a decent swing in things when comparing conditions scores from one year to the next. Different people giving different interpretations to what they’re seeing can lead to scores being confusing. If any of this makes sense?
This isn’t a post to kill the crop or say that some of you are wrong with your predictions. We’re sitting in an area that has missed a fair amount of rain, but crops look surprisingly good....from the road. We were pretty darn toasty during pollination time, so that could effect our yields. Some beans look excellent while some look pretty pathetic. Any rain in the next few weeks could help them out, but the next 10 days isn’t showing a real good chance for that.
Anyways, just throwing some Monday afternoon thoughts out there for everyone to see. Feel free to add your thoughts on mine and we’ll see just how crazy mine turn out to be! | |
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Crop conditions report
