Well Steve, I just don't know how to figure this deal.  Normally, if you give me a weather setup I could more or less say how it's going to come out.  Say 2012.  Everybody from Kansas through the southern half of the eastern corn belt got totally torched.  But, that corresponded with some really decent crops in the northern latitudes with better harvest conditions and grain quality than they typically see.

Now, we've got spotty progress all the way through the midsections.  Some of which is planted but sitting in cold dirt that just had excessive rains.  We've got a lot of ground that is only five days from it's final plant crop insurance date that has no chance of being planted by then.  We've got lots of northern acres (MN) that are planted, buy way way behind in GDUs in the place that needs them the most for a full season.  We've got a good chunk of IL/IN/OH who can handle late planted corn with a good chance of success better than most people in the country, but are the very most behind and have been from the starting gate.  In the other corner of the ring, we've got Kansas not where they would like to be either.  

I'm just having a hard time seeing a weather scenario from now through grain fill that accounts for:  being cool enough in Kansas, catching up enough GDUs for a nice finish north of the Iowa border, cranking up both the heat for vegetative growth of June corn in the ECB followed by good conditions for that corn to fill kernels, all combined with a minimum of denitrification and disease for those areas which have gotten pretty well planted but dumped on since then.   I know that NAT has a fairly deserved reputation for crying wolf, but, let's be fair and say that this crop as a whole is behind the 8 ball and if 5 million acres are gone then making up for it on yield is gonna be a tall order at this point.