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5 states to tell story of 2019 crop year

DTN’s lead market analyst says five states will tell the story of the 2019 crop year.

Todd Hultman tells Brownfield half of the 10 states looked at last week in a DTN digital crop tour have projected yields close to USDA estimates.

“But there were five significant states for both corn and soybeans that stood out to us as having much lower yields than what USDA estimated in August.”

Those states are South Dakota, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana and Ohio.

For Illinois, DTN projects a corn yield of 153 bushels per acre compared to USDA’s latest estimate of 181.

“I’ll be interested in other crop tours (and) what they say about those five states. And it’ll be interesting to see how all that compares to what USDA is going to tell us in September. But that seems to be the real key ground to understand this year.”

He says DTN collaborates with a firm called Gro Intelligence to project yield using satellite imagery, weather data, and other public data.

The digital crop tour forecasts a national average corn yield of 163.2, more than six bushels lower than USDA’s August forecast.

Soybean yields are pegged at 44.2, about 4 ½ bushels under the latest USDA estimate.