Main Street Data Indicated Record-Setting Corn Crop Yield for 2020
The U.S. ag market will see record-setting 2020 corn yields of 183 bushels per acre, according to Main Street Data, an ag data science company. This forecast is above the 178.5 bushels per acre the USDA has forecast. According to Main Street, the most significant contributing factor to the bumper crop is the optimal weather conditions occurring during the critical silking stage.
The Main Street forecast is the product of sophisticated data science applied to a data set of more than seven trillion data elements collected over the past 20 plus years. Main Street Data forecasts at the subfield level and aggregates to the county, state and national levels. The 2019 Main Street Data forecasts, made at about this time of the year, were within .1 of a bushel of the USDA corn final result and within .3 of a bushel from the USDA’s soybean final result. Main Street data is shared real-time with agriculture professionals who rely on its WeatherYield, Progressive WeatherYield, and MarketVision software. Main Street’s proprietary model includes data on weather, plant stages, soil moisture, frequency of precipitation, temperatures, and their impacts on yield. The model is more precise, particularly in bumper crop years, than satellite-based models such as NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index).
“Calling the national number as soon as possible, and then zeroing in on local acres as accurately as possible, is vital to enable the agriculture ecosystem to improve and optimize their decisions,” said Bob McClure, Main Street Data chief data scientist. “We expect our number to be higher than USDA and other forecasters, so we wanted to release it now to let growers, retailers, lenders, insurers and traders plan accordingly. It’s going to be a big year and we want the industry to make the most of it.”
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