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| Based on test plot data, I had myself 100% convinced that the 2025 national yield was going to be in the same range as 2023 and 2024. I will explain what research I had done and what it pointed to, and see if the community has any ideas how it could've gone wrong.
The first thing I did was to gather up F.I.R.S.T. test plot data (https://www.firstseedtests.com/reports/corn/). For test plot locations that have been active for all three of 2023, 2024 and 2025 - I averaged the yields on a state-by-state basis. The resulting table is contained in the first table below. The 2025 average across 97 test plots was 232 bu/ac, compared to 230 bu/ac in 2023 and 239 bu/ac in 2024. Given that 2023's USDA national average was 177.3, and 2024's was 179.3, this seemed to indicate that the 2025 national yield was likely also going to be in the same range (232/239=97.1% of 2024's 179.3 bu/ac = 174.0 bu/ac; 232/230=100.9% of 2023's 177.3 bu/ac = 178.8 bu/ac). Given this is based on 97 plots, containing seed varieties from many different companies, in approximately the same locations year-over-year, I'd have expected that test plot yield deviations from 2023 and 2024 would've been a reliable indicator of 2025's yield.
As a secondary check, I pulled test plot data from Pioneer's website, and found a pretty similar pattern. In this case I couldn't guarantee the test plots were in approximately the same locations year-over-year, but the volume of data points used should've limited the impact of that. I chose a scattering of towns across the primary corn growing areas of the country, and documented the average of all test plot yields within a 250 mile radius of each chosen town. The results of this exercise looked quite similar, and are shown in the second table below. Doing the same math again we have (241.07/245.35=98.5% of 2024's 179.3 bu/ac = 176.6 bu/ac; 241.07/237.12=101.7% of 2023's 177.3 bu/ac = 180.3 bu/ac).
So, depending upon which year and dataset we use as a basis, the estimates of 2025's national yield range between a low of 174.0 bu/ac up to a high of 180.3 bu/ac. My question to the forum is whether you have any thoughts as to why this exercise didn't produce a good estimate of where the national yield from the USDA ended up. You can argue that the USDA's figure is just plain wrong, but I don't know how it could be *that wrong* when they're pulling in survey-based yield reports from ~70k farmers. I have read where the USDA has noted that farmers tend to overreport their yields, and that the figure they ultimately put out is not based entirely off of the survey results because of that. Unfortunately they don't release enough detail about how they arrived at their figure to make any sense of how the exercise above may have went wrong.
Edited by JJM_ND 2/11/2026 21:38
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186.5?
