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EC SD | My best guess is that the hot overnight temps (around 80 deg lows) is where we lost the most yield potential, but the 100+ high temps were tough on the crops too...
I know from experience that an extended grain fill period from cool nights is when I get the largest kernels. One year I had corn just denting at the end of August followed by a cold September. It took the whole month of Sept to get from early dent to black layer. The kernels that year were nearly candy corn sized....
So this year we got the opposite finish. I expect the kernel weights to be significantly below normal as a result. How much lower? For drought stressed corn, 80,000 per bushel most years becomes around 100,000 this year. That would be a 20% loss in yield if estimating by kernel count method or the PFT method using grain length.
For the corn with excellent plant health and good soil moisture, the effect would certainly be less. Perhaps 85,000 to 90,000 kernels per bu this year instead of 80,000. That is still around a 5% to 10% yield loss!!
My gut says the western corn belt lost 10% of its yield potential last week as the hot temps were widespread across the region. If the eastern corn belt escaped this heatwave, then our national corn yield still would drop around 5% from early August forecasts, which were based on normal weather for the remaining growing season.
So far the USDA field studies have just been counting the ears without considering any aspects of the ears they find. To me that is a silly endeavor as yield is well known to have a non-linear relationship to plant population - in fact the relationship curve is quite flat at the typical populations being planted. Using their August field estimation method, if every farmer planted double their normal population next year, they would forecast a national yield of 360 bu/acre. Quite the joke really -- our tax dollars again being wasted!!
In September, USDA will weigh mature ears, but we won't see that data in any reports until harvest is over and much of the grain has left the farmer's ownership. | |
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Put a fork in her.
