Tag: corn

Last week the Illinois office of the National Agriculture Statistics Service released their report on crop yields in Illinois. The full report can be found here.
As expected, the Illinois corn yield for 2012 was only 105 bushels per acre, 52 bushels below last year. They noted that this was the lowest yield since 1988, when the average yield was only 73 bushels per acres. Because of the severe conditions of the corn crop, almost twice as many acres were harvested for silage in 2012 than in 2011.
Illinois soybean yield for 2012 was 43.0 bushels per acre, down 4.5 bushels from 2011. This was the lowest soybean yield since 2003, when the average yield was only 37.0 bushels per acre. While too late to do much good for corn, rains in the second half of August and the remains of Hurricane Isaac over Labor Day weekend may have provided some benefit to soybeans.
The one bright spot in the Illinois report was winter wheat production. The yield in 2012 was 63 bushels per acre, up 2 bushels from 2011. However, only 660,000 acres were seeded in the fall of 2011, which is down 140,000 acres from the previous fall. I suspect the decline was due in part to the already dry conditions experience in southern Illinois – the primary production area of the state.