It was a case of keys being accidentally locked in the car, a cut to the finger by a corn leaf and a chat about hail damage at a scouting stop on the Pro Farmer crop tour on Tuesday in Carlton, Nebraska.
    And thus, the monotony of scouting a seemingly-endless number of corn and soybean fields in the Midwest grain belt was broken, momentarily, by these incidents.
    At the stop in Carlton, a U.S. Agriculture Department official, in the car behind ours, accidentlly locked his keys in his rented Hyundai.
    Then, this reporter deeply sliced his finger on the leaf of a corn stalk.
    While the government man borrowed a phone from another scout to call the rental company and I dressed my wound with a wet napkin and a bandage, the farmer whose bean field we were scouting pulled up in his pickup.
    Then, Rich Mosier, a broker with brokerage and research company Allendale, Inc., passing through from his home in Davenport, Iowa, stopped for a chat.
    All of the sudden, it was a veritable meeting of the minds on the side of Highway 4.
    With a locksmith on his way, talk returned to farming.
    Scout Elwood Line, our driver and a farmer from northeast Illinois, asked if Carlton farmer John Lange was a ‘John Deere’ man, referring to the farm machinery maker Deere & Co.
    “Both — John Deere and International,” Lange said. “International combine and a John Deere head.”
    Mosier said the crops in this area, especially the dryland fields, were first hammered by hail and are now thirsty for rain.
    “The dryland has suffered the last three weeks. We haven’t had any big rains,” Mosier said.
    After about 45 minutes, the locksmith showed up to jimmy the door of the Sonata.
    Asked how he was doing, the locksmith replied, “Better than you, I guess.”
    Corn yield in the field we scouted  was projected at 193 bushels per acre, while the soybean count was 1,034 pods in a 3-by-3 foot area.