Scouts on the John Deere Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour prefer to get in, get out, and get back on the road.

Nobody on the tour has been physically attacked. But some crop scouts have feared for their lives at times when they encountered local farmers at the roadside.

Most farmers’ uncanny ability of making a short story long is one of the main reasons crop scouts try to avoid meeting the locals. Pulling samples from 20 corn fields and 20 soybean fields can take up most of a 10-hour workday so most scouts try to avoid an unscheduled visit from a chatty farmer.

Yet one group of scouts on the tour this year emerged from a cornfield in southwest Iowa to find their car blocked in by an angry farmer in his pickup truck.

“He acted like a drill sergeant in the army. He wanted $25 for each ear of corn we pulled. And he was serious until Bob, one of the other guys in our car, asked him if he would take a credit card. Then he lightened up a bit, but we were nervous for a little while,” said Lawrence Landsteiner, a corn and soybean farmer in Minnesota Lake, Minnesota, and a 6-year veteran of the crop tour.

“Afterwards, he wanted to know what the yield in his field was,” he said.

Tour organizers stress that scouts should be careful not to trample crops “like a herd of elephants” on their way in and out of fields.

Angry encounters are not uncommon, although the vast majority of the farmers that scouts meet along the way are very friendly. But I still shudder when I see a cloud of dust rising down the gravel road, signaling a fast approaching pickup truck.

Photo: Crop scout Lawrence Landsteiner (right) of Minnesota Lake, Minnesota, meets an unnamed yet peaceful farmer in Redwood County, Minnesota, on August 23. REUTERS/Karl Plume

Northwest Iowa is wet… saturated, really. Excessive rain over the past few weeks has left a few corn and soybean fields looking more like rice paddies.

These are the longest days of the crop tour. Some of the more experienced scouts come armed with rubber mud boots and full-on rain suits. Others, like myself, pack a flimsy “city boy” rain poncho that’s more of a trash bag with a drawstring hood. I have no intention of bringing my mud-caked, semi-waterproof hiking shoes home with me, although the disposable plastic boot covers donated to our crop-scouting cause by a local veterinarian are keeping my feet dry for the moment.

The storms that rolled through this part of the Corn Belt last night dumped more than three inches in some areas, with perhaps another inch today. It’s raining cats and dogs, as they say. Recent heavy storms had already packed a one-two punch of rain that softened soils. Wind knocked over some plants like dominoes.

While all this moisture may bode well for soybeans in midst of pod-filling, it could really damage corn by increasing instances of mold and fungus on ears and stalks. Wet fields and downed crops may slow corn’s dry-down process, boosting costs for farmers that need to dry the grain after harvest. Lodged and “goose-necked” plants will also make for a long harvest, with yield losses that can, in the worst cases, reach 25 to 30 percent.

But on the bright side, an extended harvest could reduce the storage crunch when farmers try to fit their record-large corn crop in the storage space that has, at times, struggled to contain more reasonable size crops.

Photo: Muddy crop scouts Elwood Line (left) of Momence, Illinois, and Bradley Bunce of Cedar Falls, Iowa, gauge corn yields outside Moville, Iowa, on August 22. REUTERS/Karl Plume

Canvassing corn fields in northwest Illinois on Wednesday, scouts on my route found consistently above-average yield prospects, with one glaring exception.

One corn field on low-lying ground in Henry County, Illinois, showed an estimated yield of 26.7 bushels per acre, a figure that jumped out when compared with our projections for three other fields in the same district, at 154.8, 160.1 and 193.7 bpa.

The stalks in the problem field were short and spindly. The ears we pulled were tiny and held only 1 to 4 inches of kernels, compared to nearly 7 inches in the other fields. Pulling back the husks, we found caterpillars dining on the few available kernels.

It seemed that nearly everything that could have gone wrong, did.

Roger Bernard, director of the eastern leg of the John Deere Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour, speculated that the field was planted late, probably due to wet conditions, and endured weather stress later on.

“That field had pollinated at just the wrong time,” he said. “For all intents and purposes, that is the equivalent of a zero (yield).”

Why would the tour include in its calculations a corn field so clearly out of line with the area’s norm?

“We don’t throw something like that out. It was a sample that we stopped at, and that was a yield number,” Bernard said.

“We’re not out there trying to find the best corn field, and we’re not trying to find the worst field. If that happens to be the sample we gathered, that’s a sample that we come in with.”

Lunch on a Farm Belt crop tour is more than a meal — it’s an opportunity to explore small-town eateries way, way off the beaten path, and seek out the unique local dish.

Most scouts hit the fields starting at around 7 a.m., so by noon it’s easy to work up an appetite. That helps us embrace home-style foods we might normally shun for reasons of cardiac health. I’m talking about gravy. And dessert.

“My philosophy is to go someplace I can’t find any place else. And especially any restaurant that puts the word ‘pie’ in its name,” said Roger Bernard, director of the eastern leg of the John Deere Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour.

On Wednesday, Bernard, another crop scout and I didn’t find anything with “pie” in its name, but we did spot the Eureka Inn in Prophetstown, Illinois.

The inn was built in 1856 in Portland, Illinois, more than 2 miles away from Prophetstown. In 1872, it was moved intact atop a rolling platform of logs, pulled by horses, according to our waitress and the Prophetstown website.

On our visit, all three of us ordered the daily special, chicken in gravy on biscuits, and I had a cup of excellent fresh tomato soup. Afterward, the waitress brought us a plateful of cookies - homemade, of course.

Afterward, Bernard fondly recalled offerings from diners and hole-in-the-wall cafes on crop tours past, including deep-fried pickles and something called the Big Yonk, which turned out to be a hamburger topped with coleslaw. It was named for a racehorse on whom the Indiana restaurant owner had bet and won money.

“It was good,” Bernard said.

President Bush greets diners in a restaurant in Peoria, Illinois January 30, 2007.  REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque.

Hot weather in August cut the yield potential of Indiana’s soybean crop, but prospects for the state’s corn were roughly the same from a year ago, according to scouts on an annual crop tour. They sampled 99 Indiana corn fields on the tour this year.

Some corn fields that looked healthy when viewed from the road produced undersized ears or low plant populations. “I would say (crop potential) is extremely variable, even though it appeared good,” said Byron Jones, a farmer from Saybrook, Illinois (pictured right).

Said Mark Bernard, a crop consultant for the eastern leg of the tour.   “After seeing Ohio the day before, I thought maybe we would be looking at a disappointment in Indiana. But I was slightly, pleasantly, surprised. They probably got a little more rain at the right times.”

At 6-foot-3, I’m taller than the average crop scout. But I can easily get lost in some of these
Nebraska corn fields this year. Plants in some fields are more than 10 feet tall, with ears as big as my forearm. Get into a good spot in the field and the canopy completely blocks out the sky, ruining any chances of navigating by the sun. The crop scout’s goodie bag contains a calculator, insect repellent, sunscreen, but no compass and no GPS.

It’s not unheard of for a scout on the tour to get lost in such a jungle. A few years back, one woman got lost after she mistakenly walked in the wrong direction after taking a sample. The sound of the corn’s thick leaves rustling in the wind drowned out her fellow scouts’ attempts to guide her back to the car by honking the horn. She emerged more than an hour later on the other end of the field, slightly shaken but with a vivid story to tell later at the crop scout meeting. The corn crop will no doubt be a bin-buster this year as farmers planted more acres than any time since 1944. The U.S. Agriculture Department on Aug. 1 estimated Nebraska’s crop at 1.4616 billion bushels, up from 1.178 billion last year. Yields were seen at 168 bushels per acre, up 10.5 percent from last year’s 152 bpa crop, according to the USDA.

U.S. production was projected at a record 13.054 billion bushels, shattering the previous record of 11.807 billion bushels set in 2004. Ethanol plants have been building additional storage in recent years to hold more of this massive crop, but no doubt there will be corn piled on the ground somewhere come harvest time. Many farmers have also been investing in more of their own storage bins to take advantage of the carry in the market. But many grain elevators in this area are in a precarious position. Growers have more options than ever for their grain holding needs so some elevators have been slow to expand their storage capacity. However, some new shiny steel bins have sprouted alongside the older concrete bins typically seen around the

Corn Belt. It will be interesting to see where all this corn goes as farmers inevitably plant more and more corn for the ethanol, livestock, and export sectors while science pushes the upper limits of yield potential.

Grain traders like to say “Rain makes grain.” On a crop tour, it makes for grumpy crop scouts — especially when the scouts are farmers who have not seen decent moisture all summer, until now.

I spent Monday with three such farmers, scouting corn and soybean fields across northwest Ohio on one leg of the John Deere Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour.
We drove through showers much of the day, varying from light to heavy to near-biblical. We got plenty of firsthand exposure to the region’s rich, clay-colored soil each time we would venture out into a field, take our measurements and return back to our van, the soles of our boots caked with a thick layer of mud. Scraping our feet against the edge of the rural pavement had only a limited effect.

“This is the most rain we’ve gotten in two or three months,” said Don Harris, 70, a scout on the tour who farms corn and soybeans on about 470 acres near Muncie, Indiana. Showers hit his land on Monday as well.

Farmers are used to nature’s ironies, but getting soaked in the fields seemed like insult added to injury after dry weather stunted the region’s corn. Plants were shoulder-high in some areas where healthier corn is closer to 7 feet tall.
“I think it’s too late to help the corn, but it might help the beans,” Harris said.

“If this rain had come a month and a half ago, it’d be worth a lot of money,” he said, drying off in the van.

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The long, wet road from Chicago to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, goes through Denver… at least for this crop scout. Powerful thunderstorms cancelled one of my flights, delayed a second seriously-rerouted one, and added nearly 1,000 miles and 8 hours to a 450-mile trip that shouldn’t normally take much more than an hour.

Other scouts on the John Deere Pro Farmer Midwest crop tour, some traveling from as far as Argentina, Brazil, or Great Brittain, had an equally difficult time getting to Sioux Falls because of the storm, arriving as late as 3 a.m. for a brief nap before Monday’s 7 a.m. start. Bloodshot eyes and extra large cups of coffee, which usually begin showing up around day two or three of the four-day tour, were the norm on Monday morning.

But as inconvenient as the storms were for air travelers, all this rain could do wonders for the soybean crop, which is fully in pod-filling mode. Mid-season heat and drought stress were showing in the low pod counts in some fields, but persistent rain in the past few weeks has turned things around for soy growers in southeastern South Dakota. As Chip Flory, the director of the tour’s western leg noted, muddy boots on the mid-August crop tour means soybean yields would likely rise from the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Aug. 1 estimates. The torrential downpour that crop scouts awoke to find on Monday morning ensured there would be plenty of upside along with the mud.

Organizers have for the first time asked scouts to take note if corn has been planted in fields that housed corn last year, not necessarily to gauge the effects of this year of corn-on-corn planting but to start a database to gauge its effects on yields for future tours. One of the themes of this year’s tour is how much corn is really out there after U.S. farmers seeded more corn this year than they have since 1944 to meet rising demand from ethanol producers. In fact, organizers have acknowledged that they fully expected scouts to have a hard time finding as many soybean fields to survey as they do corn fields. That has not been too much of an issue thusfar, but I’m told it will be as we work our way south and east through the big ethanol producing states of Nebraska and Iowa.

I’ll get my next rest — six hours of sleep if I’m lucky — in Nebraska, known as the Corn Husker state despite large swathes of land more suitable for wheat or sorghum planting than for corn and soybeans. Many farmers there use irrigation pivots to do Mother Nature’s work if she has an off year. She’s been pretty busy lately in South Dakota.

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    Mud boots, check. Sun screen, check. Bug spray, check.
   The corn is 8-feet tall, the soybeans are setting and filling pods and harvest of these key food and livestock feed crops is only weeks away. That means it’s time for the annual tour of central U.S. farm fields in an aim to assess yields and production.
    Corn and soy are among the Midwestern pillars of the country’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural sector, consumed by people from Indonesia to Iraq. The condition of the new crops impacts pricing and purchasing decisions around the world.
    More than 70 crop specialists are expected to participate in the industry-sponsored tour, which begins Monday and includes farmers, merchandisers and government officials. Driving from field to field in key growing states like Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota, the crop scouts  will inspect corn and soybean fields in the heart of the U.S. grain belt. 
    Colleague Karl Plume and myself, both reporters for Reuters, will be joining in on the four-day jaunt, which organizers have broken into western and eastern segments.
    The U.S. Department of Agriculture last week forecast this year’s U.S. corn crop a record 13.054 billion bushels, with an average yield of 152.8 bushels per acre, the second-highest yield on record.
    That is largely due farmers this year planting the largest amount of corn land - 92.9 million acres - since 1944 to take advantage of the rise in corn prices to 10-year highs in February this year amid demand from the ethanol sector.
    Still, some crop specialists worry that a lack of rainfall in recent weeks in the southern Midwest could drop soy yields.
In fact, the USDA, in its monthly report on Aug. 10, lowered its U.S. soybean crop estimate to 2.625 billion bushels, with an average yield of 41.966 bpa.
    The crop scouts will come up with their own estimates at the conclusion of the tour after viewing hundreds of fields and getting down in the dirt to measure such things as corn ear lengths, numbers of kernels and soybean pods.
    Hundred-degree days, 12-hour drives - here we come! 

A storm hit the Chicago grain markets late in the week ended August 10. But it wasn’t the kind that grain traders usually expect to rock their markets.
    This one came from Wall Street, which quaked and baked in the heat of worries about fallout from the subprime mortgage debacle. Even the Fed and other central banks got into the act, injecting billions into the banking systems in the U.S. and Europe — a move that for many just rattled more nerves.
    The fallout for grain markets took the form of whipsaw moves that seemed to fly the face of agricultural fundamentals — as wheat prices, for example, fresh off an 11-year high on Thursday and after bullish data from Friday’s USDA crop reports, saw huge opening losses at Friday’s CBOT opening. 
    Hedge fund selling, on fear and on margin calls elsewhere, was cited. So throw out the grain fundamentals.
    “Everyone had their eye on the stock market … there’s a lot of talk of funds liquidating positions,” said one floor trader on Friday morning.
    Weakness in world stock markets — Dow Jones blue chips were down as much as 200 points on Friday morning before grains opened, after falling more than 300 points on Thursday — set the tone. The Dow recovered some, ending 31 points lower.
    But both soybeans and wheat closed lower on Friday despite USDA’s friendly U.S. crop data issued before the CBOT markets opened. Granted, most of the “good” news was factored into prices. But stock market woes intensified the selling.
    On the other hand, corn — which should have fallen after bearish, bigger than expected USDA estimates issued on Friday — closed higher. But that also seemed the effect of big commodity funds exiting their positions — this time, short positions held on ideas of a record crop this Fall.
    Open interest in corn fell by roughly 50,000 contracts in the last three trading sessions of the week.
    The biggest factors traders will watch next week are:
    –Wall Street. Additional market woes connected with the U.S. subprime mortgage sector will likely press prices.
    –Midwest weather. Crops in the southern Midwest are baking in 100+ F degree days with little rain. Any relief could trigger a selloff. On Friday there were forecasts for the central Midwest looking milder, which weighed on soy prices.
    –European weather and export demand. U.S. and European wheat hit new highs this week with Chicago wheat notching an 11-year top of $6.80-1/2 on worries about a short EU crop due to harsh weather this growing season. In turn, the European feedgrain markets are rising, with traders keeping a close eye them for price direction for corn and soymeal.
    Government and industry numbers to be issued the week of Aug. 13:
    USDA releases weekly crop ratings on Monday. Traders expecting a 1-2 point decline in the good to excellent ratings.   The National Oilseed Processors Association will release its monthly July crush data on Tuesday.
    The last trading day of August soybeans, soymeal and soyoil is Aug. 14.