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On a typical
Monday morning in the summer most NDSU Extension Agents with agriculture responsibilities are faced with the task of putting together a weekly crop weather report. This comes at the busiest time of the week for most
county agents as all those questions that came up over the weekend are being called in first thing Monday morning. The weather report talks about crop progress, condition of the crop and general field conditions.
Filling out the crop report for me starts at the beginning of last week. I take notes all week when I drive and scout crops trying to
include the important factors in the report. This is particularly challenging when you have a county that is approximately 70 miles wide and 40 miles deep. There is a lot of ground to cover if the report is to be
reflective of the whole county. There are three very distinct growing regions in Walsh County. They are the Red River Valley, the beach area and what I call the prairie pothole region. They grow different crops,
have different frost dates and hardly ever have the same conditions. We are asked to give an average for all of the crops and conditions. Average, I once read, is defined as having one foot in boiling water and the
other in an ice bucket. This is often very true of Walsh County. We may have the southwestern area of Walsh County drowning and some of the crops on the beach soils crying for rain. So a county agent must ask, does
that make the soil moisture average in the county? You are going to make someone mad with that report. I try to localize the conditions in the comments section as a way for people who read it to try and understand
there are no averages that work in my county.
I try to prepare as best I can for the report and I will typically spend a couple hours on my motorcycle on Sunday night crop
scouting to gather data for the report. I will usually head in the direction of the county I have not been in recently and will keep driving and stopping until I have what I need or it gets dark. Many Sunday nights
it gets dark before I quit scouting. We work on a percentage basis on crop conditions so one has to try and estimate where we are on a percentage basis across the county for each crop.
Agents prepare the best they can for these reports and most of us are concerned that some readers seem to take what we read as the
gospel truth figured to the tenth of one percent. While we try to do our best, one must realize it is only one estimate and is very often a judgment call. I have even had phone calls from producers and county
commissioners about the numbers I use in the report. I sometimes have to explain to them that while a heavy thunderstorm hit an area of the county, the rest may have missed it completely or only had small amounts of
rain. I again must view the whole of a very large county.
Crop weather reports are used by many people to figure crop condition, potential yield and get an idea what the ND wheat or corn crop
is doing. It is not a perfect system and usually more than one person in the county does this. In Walsh County that is the FSA Director. The take home message here is that we do the best we can but it is an estimate.
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