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Bean counter Danekas up all night with numbers

Missouri Agriculture Statistics Director Gene Danekas was among the sleepless analysts in Washington preparing for release of the latest crop production forecasts issued by the USDA. Danekas and other state directors are occasionally called into service compiling the monthly report, which Danekas says begins with counting corn ears and soybean pods in hundreds of fields in each state.

“It all funnels into Washington under high security,” explained Danekas from his hotel room where he went to rest this morning after the report was released. “It’s all, as we call it, encrypted so if anybody got their hands on it they couldn’t make any sense out of it anyway.”

The late night session begins about 11:30 at night. “We go in behind locked and guarded doors and start pulling all this information in and doing a U.S. analysis to determine what our corn crop is and soybean crop and everything else,” said Danekas.

During the night, Danekas says those locked in the room discuss and review what the data indicates, and how it compares with some other years that may have been similar. “We’re looking at some of the plant counts, ear counts, ear sizes, pod counts in soybeans, and so on,” said Danekas, whose home base is Columbia, Missouri.

Just before the report is released, one more set of eyes becomes privy to the data. “About 8:15 a.m. Eastern Time, the [Ag] Secretary comes over and we brief him behind locked doors,” said Danekas.

“At 8:30 a.m. it’s released to the public and it all goes from there,” said Danekas. “We all know that some of the numbers affect the market one way or another.”

The report indicates the average corn yield is expected to be just under 162 bushels to the acre and the crop size, while not a record is “within a smidge of a record at just under 13 billion bushels,” said Danekas.

The soybean crop is projected to be a record 3.25 billion bushels yielding 42.3 bushels to the acre.

AUDIO: Gene Danekas (11 min. MP3)