Welcome to the 2015 Farms.com Risk Management U.S. Corn Belt Crop Tour. My name is Moe Agostino, Chief Commodity Strategist. Welcome. Thank you to our sponsors: Tasco Dome, Pride Seeds, South West Ag Partners Inc., and Penta Tillage. It’s day one of the state of Ohio on our crop tour - the sunny state of Ohio. We’re not experiencing any severe weather today but it has been over the last 5-7 days. Now before we get into crop conditions on what we’re seeing, I’m just going to give you a quick update. The latest USDA crop progress report showed that in Ohio, very poor to poor. Soy has jumped 2%. Sorry, jumped from 6-11% in this past week as of June 22nd. Good to excellent 69-55%. Corn – 2-7, very poor to poor. Corn good to excellent, dropped from 80-61 and soft red winter wheat, very poor to poor. 6-8 and good to excellent a drop from 68-64. You can see in the background here some of that yellow corn as you pan further down there. If we compare this to 2014, we’re not seeing what we saw last year. For every two fields that were bad last year, where there were 8-9 that were trumping those two bad fields. I think it’s reversed this year because there’s too much moisture. You’re seeing more bad than good. It’s early – we’ll keep you posted.
We are now standing in front of a soybean field in the state of Ohio. We’re 6 miles south of Attica in Crawford county and this looks like an average bunch of beans here. We’ve had a pretty wet month of May. A record going back 121 years, so we’ve had a lot of moisture here in the last week or so. Finally getting some heat, but the beans have got those wet feet and it looks like in some cases, farmers have had a tough time spraying as well and trying to control some weeds. So, looking average. Not as good as we saw last year in our start of our tour in 2014.
We’re now in front of a wheat field. We’re travelling East on highway 62, we’re actually on a side road called Denny Road near Wilmington, Ohio, and it’s a really nice wheat field. We’ve seen some wheat fields already being harvested here. It’s mature, looks like we could harvest if we could only get some dry weather. We started the day with some sun but the storm has rolled in again and there’s flash flooding in this area, some severe weather and of course we’ve also got a river flowing in front of this wheat field, so this persistent rain continues in the state of Ohio.
We’re now in front of a bean field again, near Denny Road East 62 near Wilmington, Ohio and better looking beans. As we travel further south, we get some bigger plants but again beans with wet feet, we’ve got beans in standing water. Looking better but this rain is going to have to stop and we need some dry conditions and some heat to help improve these plants.
We’re now standing in front of a cornfield. We’re south of highway 125, travelling east toward the city of Cincinnati, Ohio. We’re going to end our tour – day one, June 26th – in the state of Ohio. This is a good looking cornfield, probably 10-15% of the crops in Ohio look like this. I even got my own feet wet – it’s been pretty wet and rainy today. We started off sunny, we got some thunder storms in the background again, but to conclude: the state of Ohio ranks 10th in corn production, 7th in soybean production so it’s not that important of a state, but if the rest of the states look like Ohio there’s no record production coming down the pipe, we’re not going to get record yields. In fact, were going to start to shave yields going forward. At this stage, I’m not liking what I see. I see more fields that are not looking so hot versus the odd decent field, if we compare it to last year’s record crop when I was travelling through Ohio. And we’re in the southern part of Ohio where they’ve been getting a lot of moisture. The corn crop was much taller, was much earlier than last year, so at this stage we’ll see what happens. There’s still a big growing season ahead of us – it’s only June 26th, and we still got to get through the pollination stage but looking for lower production from Ohio.