Moe Agostino will tour 12 states beginning in June
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
A popular crop tour will be traveling through the U.S. Corn Belt later this summer.
Moe Agostino, chief commodity strategist with Farms.com Risk Management, will visit 12 U.S. states (Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Wisconsin) on his 10th annual U.S. Corn Belt Crop Tour.
The tour begins on June 29 and wraps up on July 16.
“It’s about (8,700 miles) I’ll do in those days,” he told Farms.com.
Given what’s going on in the industry, the 2021 tour could be one of the more engaging tours in recent memory.
“This is going to be an interesting year,” he said. “Markets are exploding to the top side and we’ve got a pending drought, so we need to see what Mother Nature brings.”
This year specifically, Agostino will be looking to see if farmers planted more acres than what the USDA reported.
The March Planting Intentions report left millions of unaccounted acres, he said.
“Markets are concerned because there was between 3- and 3.5 million acres unaccounted for after the report and we don’t have enough acres to fix tight balance sheets,” he said. “Some people are hoping we’re going to add two million more acres to both corn and beans. Along the route I’m going to try to figure that out.”
Along the tour, Agostino will meet with farmers and experts to get insight about how the planting season went and how crops are looking overall.
He will then share his interviews and findings.
“I’ll interview a farmer about plant population, whether they got enough moisture and things like that,” he said. “Then, at the end of each day viewers get a summary of what I’ve seen in the state, and I tend to rank the state,” he said. “And I try to estimate at the end of the tour what the final yield for corn and soybeans will be. We were spot on last year with what the final USDA numbers.”
Farmers interested in having Agostino visit their farms can apply online, by sending an email to riskvolunteer@farms.com or calling 1-888-248-4893, ext. 808.
Selected farmers will be entered into a draw to win a one-year marketing subscription valued at $600.