The Farms.com team has been monitoring the Pro Farmer Crop Tour online.
They released their corn and soybean yield estimates for several midwestern cornbelt states.
The Pro Farmer Crop Tour was made up of a large number of crop scouts in the mud and sampling fields across the Midwest. The tour reported seeing a really good crop- but maybe not quite at record levels as has been suggested in the USDA August Crop Production report from earlier in the month.
Karen Braun, Global Agriculture Columnist with Thomsons Reuters in Chicago wrote a well balanced summary of her observations and the tour results, see the following link.
The eastern cornbelt group of crop scouts came up with an estimated Illinois corn crop of 193.5 bushels per acre- short of the 200 bushels per acre predicted by USDA- it is a much bigger Illinois crop than in 2015, when the state average ended up being 171.64 bushels per acre.
The Iowa group of scouts saw an "ok" crop in northwest and west central Iowa- but did find a much better corn crop in southwest Iowa versus 2015. Chris Clayton with DTN tweeted on southwest Iowa "SW Iowa results are impressive. SW Iowa pulled an average 191.87 in district that tour averaged 169 over last 3 years." Again, the western leg, led by Chip Flory, reported seeing a really good crop- but likely not quite as good as what USDA was projecting in their 2016 August Crop Production Report.
To see the more findings visit Twitter.com and search #pftour16