Pro Farmer Crop Tour 2026
Nightly results
Scouts run two routes at once, Monday through Thursday, and states report at the nightly meetings. Corn is a sampled yield in bushels per acre. Soybeans are pod counts in a three-foot square — more pods means more beans, but pods do not convert cleanly into bushels, so treat them as a direction, not a yield.
4 of 7 state corn figures are in — 4 below. These are state samples, not a national yield: Pro Farmer's national number is acreage-weighted and posts at the end of the week.
Three numbers on the table
USDA's forecast, our own model's number, and the tour's — all published before anyone knows the answer.
How good has the tour actually been?
Every tour since 2015, against the crop that actually came in. Bar shows how far the tour's final corn number landed from USDA's final yield: left of the line means the tour called it too small, right means too big.
Over the last 11 tours (2015–2025), Pro Farmer's final corn number missed USDA's eventual final by 4.1 bushels on average. USDA's own August forecast missed by 3.1. USDA came closer in 7 of those 11 years.
The tour has also leaned one way: it came in under the final yield in 7 of 11 years, and in those years it finished 5.3 bushels low on average. Across all 11, the net lean is 2.6 bushels low. That is a real tendency, not a rule — it ran high in 3 of them, the widest by 5.5 bushels, and it landed exactly on the final once.
| Year | Tour | USDA Aug | Final | Tour vs final — bushels per acre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2025Note on 2025A government shutdown killed the October reports, so this crop year rests on one fewer USDA forecast round than the others. | 182.7 | 188.8 | 186.5 | |
| 2024 | 181.1 | 183.1 | 179.3 | |
| 2023 | 172.0 | 175.1 | 177.3 | |
| 2022 | 168.1 | 175.4 | 173.3 | |
| 2021 | 177.0 | 174.6 | 177.0 | |
2020Note on 2020The August 10 derecho flattened millions of Iowa acres the day before USDA's data cutoff. The tour ran but scouts reported from the road instead of meeting up at night. The tour ran in modified form that year, so 2020 is not measuring quite the same exercise as the others. | 177.5 | 181.8 | 172.0 | |
2019Note on 2019USDA changed how it builds the August corn and soybean forecast this year, dropping the August field-measurement survey. August numbers from 2019 on are not built the same way as the years before. | 163.3 | 169.5 | 168.0 | |
| 2018 | 177.3 | 178.4 | 176.4 | |
| 2017 | 167.1 | 169.5 | 176.6 | |
| 2016 | 170.2 | 175.1 | 174.6 | |
| 2015 | 164.3 | 168.8 | 168.4 |
Across the same 11 years, the tour's soybean production number missed the final by 0.13 billion bushels on average, against 0.12 billion for USDA's August forecast. On beans it is close to a coin flip between them.
What counts as the final. Final yield here means the figure USDA published the following January in its annual summary. USDA revises a few of those later by a tenth to half a bushel; this page uses the January number for every year so the comparison stays consistent.
Our own number is on the record too. The AGSIST nowcast above was locked Aug 11 — the day before the August WASDE — and published on the analyst board before the tour rolled. We also filed two directional calls that report: corn revising up, beans revising up. USDA revised both down. Both are graded misses, kept on the record. It stays where it is whether it ends up looking smart or not.
Sources. This page is not affiliated with Pro Farmer or Farm Journal. Tour figures are theirs; the comparison and the arithmetic are ours.