I am sorry I did not post about day three of the crop tour sooner.  I have had multiple issues with cell phone coverage and Internet service on this trip so far.

Yesterday, we had to go north about 25 miles from Nebraska City before taking the toll bridge over the Missouri River near Plattsmouth, Nebraska.  Again, as we crossed the river, we noted multiple buildings, pivots and other structures under multiple feet of water.  That area will still take many weeks or months to recover.

We then headed due south and got almost to the Missouri border and then turned East.  For about 30-40 miles of driving in this area, we saw many areas of hail and wind devastation to the crops.  In one 80 acre field, we saw maybe 3 ears of corn standing with the remainder of the whole crop laying completely on the ground.  I tweeted a couple of these photos to Twitter.

The average bushel count for corn in this district was barely 110 bushels.  As we crossed over I-80, we came upon our largest yield of the date at about 205 bushels, however, the land was very dry and this ended up being one of our worst soybean count.  The corn crop was set a few weeks ago, however, beans are still making pods, etc. and this heat and lack of rain is not helping.

We then traveled almost to the top of Iowa and turned West to get to Spencer, Iowa.  The corn  in this area was very steady in the 160-200 range and it appears that the two west districts in central and northern Iowa may be a little better than last year, however, Southwest Iowa is expected to be 20% or more worse than last year.

I will post you on the last day either tonight or in the morning.

Just finished up with the dinner and presentation on the numbers.  Appears there was almost 200 farmers in attendance.

Nebraska corn was called about 4-5 bushels less than last years crop tour’s numbers but almost exactly equal with the three year trend.  This was in line with my two days of going on the route.  I did not see any bumper crops out there, but also did not see any major disasters.

The big news of the night was the crop in Indiana.  The USDA was calling for 150 bushels on August 1.  The Crop Tour came in with about 143 bushels which is about 19 bushels under the three year trend.  Normally, the Crop Tour numbers need to about about 2-3 bushels to get the actual number for the year.  This means the USDA number may be about 5 bushels too high.

Since both South Dakota, Ohio and Nebraska call for lower numbers, it is up to Iowa and Illinois to make up for the Indiana shortfall.  We will find out on Illinois tomorrow and Iowa on Thursday.

I will keep you posted.

Today was our lightest day of traveling.  We left Grand Island, Nebraska this morning at 7 am and spent most of the day headed a little south, then east, then north, then east, then south and east to finish at Nebraska City, Nebraska at the Lied Lodge at the Arbor Day Farm.  If you have never been to this lodge, I would highly suggest visiting it.

On the route, I would call the counts we had nothing special either way.  We had a couple around 200, a couple around 110, and the rest in the 120 to 175 range.  We visited 10 counties and made a total of 10 counts.  Our average bushel per acre for corn ended up at exactly 150.

In comparing our counts to the county averages for last year, 2 were higher, 1 was even and the other 7 were lower, but you can not tell anything from one route on the tour.  Pro Farmer will issuing their calls for Nebraska and Indiana tonight and I have no way of knowing which way it will go.

Tomorrow, we leave and tour Western Iowa and end up at Spencer, Iowa in the Northwest corner of the state.

I will probably make a post after tonight with my thoughts on the numbers.

We arrived late Sunday night in Sioux Falls, South Dakota just in time for the meeting with all of the other tour participants.  With the flooding of the Missouri River near Omaha, we had to make several detours which probably added an hour to our drive.  The river looks like it has come down maybe a foot, but it is still very high.

We left Sioux Falls around 6:30 Monday morning and made a direct bee line to Sioux City, Iowa and crossed over the Missouri River there.  We took a sample in Dakota County which was in the 135 range and then moved into Dixon where we saw extensive hail damage from the storm of last Thursday.  Talking to some folks at the local convenience store, we noted that the storm took out a swath of about 5 miles by 100 miles and I know we saw about 25 square miles of this.  You would look at a bean field and all you saw was some light green stalks with no leaves or pods on them as far as you could see in the field.

We then motored another 30 miles or so west and then turned south for about 15 miles and then came back due east for about 40 miles.  In each County, we took a least one sample.  In about the fourth County, we got our first irrigated field sample and that ended up the best of the day at 230 bushels.

Bean samples were generally in the good range, however, there were several areas that we noted were extremely dry and if they do not get rain, the beans are in trouble.

We noted many areas where the stalks had been knocked over due to either wind or hail or both and all scouts noted hail damage in many of the fields.

Throwing out the high irrigated sample, our yield estimates ranged from a low of 102 to about 175 and compared to last year, our yields were down.  However, it appears that the call for South Dakota and Ohio is very much in line with the USDA estimates and tomorrow we will be finished with Nebraska and will have a better idea where we are at.

I tried to post during the drive, however, the cell service in Nebraska on our route was spotty at best and I could not get enough service to get my IPad to post to the site, so I will have to write a nightly recap of the trip.

However, I am tweating to Twitter (say that fast five times in a row) throughout the day at @farmcpa, so please follow me there.

I am spending the night in Spokane since my plane leaves at 6:30 tomorrow morning. I did not feel like getting up at 2 am to drive three hours to catch my flight. That is one of the joys to living in Yakima, Washington.

I will arrive in Kansas City tomorrow at about 1 and meet up with my farm partner and then make the five hour drive to Sioux Falls, SD to meet up with the Western leg of the crop tour group. Looks like there will be about 40 of us in the West and about 60 on the East leg.

I think with the very wet spring in the East nobody really knows how well that crop is doing. By the end of the week we should have a better idea.

I plan on writing two or three posts each day and I am writing this on Blogsy on my IPad and so far it seems to be going good.

I will keep you posted.

We had a reader in Washington state suggest that we try to explain how steep some of these hills are that we harvest in this area.  Unless you have been on a combine harvesting a steep hill, it is hard to explain just how steep these hills are.

I know that as a child with my two siblings, we decided to go sledding down our “steep hill” by our house.  It took us about 15 minutes to walk up to the top of the hill.  We then put the sled down and all three of us got on it and away we went.  It only took about 100 feet for all three of us to get knock off the sled since it was so steep, we could not control it.

Another steep hill we had, the combine would start up the sidehill to get to the top.  At the bottom, we were cutting a full swath and by the time we got halfway up the hill, the combine had slid half way down the swath area and by the time we got to the top of the hill, we were lucky to be cutting a 5 foot section.

We had Caterpillar crawler tractors then and I remember riding with my dad around 10 years old and we would be coming up this same hill pulling the plow and as we got toward the top all you saw was blue sky and just as you crested the hill, the crawler tractor would continue to climb up into the air and then gravity would take over and the front end of the crawler would plunge back to earth.  Now, that was what I called a great amusement ride.

On a slightly more tragic note, we had purchased a brand new International 453 combine.  This was my second year of driving the combine during harvest and normally I would have been operating it this day, but had spent the night a friend’s house and my dad said he would drive it that morning.  We were cutting a field with moderately steep hills, but not too bad.  My father was going up hill when the transmission gears blew up and back then you spent most of the time standing up while driving.   Once the gears went, the combine immediately started to go backwards down the hill.  This caused my dad to grab the steering wheel and turn the combine into the hill which caused it to tip over pinning my father inside of the cab.

He was pinned inside the cab for over three hours while the emergency people worked on getting him out.  The gruesome part was that the combine’s throttle lever went through his leg pinning him inside of the cab.  He had use a hacksaw to cut himself out of the cab.

But being the tough German he was, he was back helping me combine the next summer.

There are many YouTube videos out there of combining on steep hills, but they do not really show you how steep these hills are.

Here is a sample of one of them.

I spent Friday afternoon and all day Saturday harvesting wheat for my cousins near Dixie, Washington.  Dixie is the town I grew up in until we moved to the big city of Walla Walla when I was in high school.  The fields we were harvesting on were about a mile away from the old homestead.

The crops down there this year are what I would call a bumper crop.  There is lots of dry land wheat that will do around 135 to 155 bushels per acre.

I was driving a Case IH 2388 with rear wheel assist which I needed several times.  This country has lots of areas that are fairly steep.  In one draw near the creek, I almost ended up going into the neighbor’s field twice before I was able to get the combine turned around.  I was always taught on steep hills to turn the combine down the hill when making a turn, not up the hill.  Well, when I made these two turns, there was so much weight on the front end of the combine that the rear wheels were unable to dig into the ground enough to turn the combine so I just went straight for about 50 feet before it finally got enough purchase to finally get the machine to  turn.

Another site that I had not seen for a while is a new Case IH 8010 trailing a large baler.  It looks like it was going less than one mile per hour and putting out a large bale of straw about every 200 feet or so.  It appears there is a good market for this as a feed product since there is some actual wheat mixed in with the straw according to my cousin.

As I have said before, my idea of a vacation is to drive the combine and I really enjoyed my day and half on the machine.

On Saturday, I met up with a couple of my partners in the CPA firm in New Ulm, Minnesota to ride motorcycles.  We left about 9:30 in the morning and drove out of town up onto a nice flat area with very good looking crops.  We then dropped back down into the Minnesota River Vally and went along the river for about 10 miles.  Or in most cases, I should say we drove along the lake.  The river is still very high and in many areas, you could sell very productive farmland under water.

We continued onto toward Mankato and again the corn and beans looked to be in very good shape.  Although it is hard to note heat stress from the highway.  Also, smelled lots of money along the road, i.e. hog confinement facilities were everywhere.

At Lake Washington, a good size lake near Mankato, we stopped for lunch.  It was very nice out on the deck eating lunch and recovering from sitting on the motorcycle.  After lunch, we wandered up toward St. Peter, which at one point was either the state capital of Minnesota or had plans to be the state capital.  After there, we made a beeline back to New Ulm.

All in all, a very rewarding a relaxing way to check out the farm country in Southern Minnesota.

Also, in driving from Sioux Falls to Omaha on Sunday, I noted the heavy flood damage in the Sioux City area.  There appeared to be a fairly new Hilton Garden Inn that had become a island all to itself.  Sand bags were placed all around it and the river was right up to the bags.  Many parts of the city appeared to completely covered in water.

I crossed over on Highway 30 near Blair, Nebraska and on both sides of the road for about two miles was completely underwater.  The Missouri was extremely high there, but it looked like it had started to recede a little.

I grew up on a wheat farm near Walla Walla, Washington and one of my next door neighbors was Batman, Adam West that is.  As a young child, one of my favorite shows growing up was Batman (however, as I got older, the show got a little cheesier).  Adam West, who was Batman, grew up on a wheat farm not t00 far from where I lived.

Here is an article describing his career and note the reference to his farm background.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City just published their National Trends in Farm Lending for the second quarter of this year.

Due to the increase in input costs, operating loan levels have increased dramatically from the second quarter of 2010, up nearly 36%.  The number of livestock loans dropped slightly from the year before, however, the average loan amount almost doubled, pushing the volume of livestock loans more than 25% higher.

Capital spending on the farm for machinery and equipment seems to have cooled during this quarter.  Loan volumes for farm machinery and equipment plunged from a first quarter spike and were 36% below the year-ago levels.  I have a feeling that the 50%/100% bonus depreciation enacted late last year has soaked up a lot of the demand for new equipment and these types of sales may remain low until year-end.

The average borrowing rate on operating loans fell from 5.3% to 4.7%, however, the rate for equipment loans did incur a slight uptick to almost 5.4%.