The Fastline Blog

Tuesday, September 6, 2011: Some areas of the Midwest did fairly well on rainfall over the holiday weekend and other areas did quite poorly…which is how I envisioned the weekend rainfall pattern shaping up when I wrote this report back on Friday. Iowa and Ohio had some of the best weekend rainfall totals, as it [...]

Read Full Post »

Friday, September 2, 2011: The first day of the meteorological fall (which runs through the end of November) was a hot one in the Midwest. Everyone had highs at least to 90 degrees, but it was not that hard to find places in Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois that reached 100 degrees or higher. It was [...]

Read Full Post »

Wednesday, August 31, 2011: Nice rains of 0.50-1.00″ and locally over one inch over about the southeastern half of Iowa yesterday were certainly welcomed but it sure would have been better if they had fallen three or four weeks ago. Most of that rain did not make it to the east of the Mississippi River, [...]

Read Full Post »

Tuesday, August 30, 2011: You can’t grow corn and soybeans without rain, and we are certainly proving that this summer as crop ratings have continued their steady fall ever since we started to see parts of the Corn Belt dry out starting in late June. National corn and soybean ratings were down hard this week, [...]

Read Full Post »

Monday, August 29, 2011: A summer of 2011 that has featured more than its fair share of hot days across a lot of the Nation is going to have one more hot spell this week…and then hopefully the last of the heat until the summer of 2012. Texas has started a new string of consecutive [...]

Read Full Post »

Thursday, August 25, 2011: If you are located in the Nation’s midsection and your crops need and could still benefit from a big, soaking rain…chances are good that when you next see such a rain, it will be too late on the calendar for that rain to be of any good to your crops. There [...]

Read Full Post »

Wednesday, August 24, 2011: If you are north of Interstate 74 in Illinois, you got a nice rain yesterday that in most places was over 0.75″ and for a lot of locations was over an inch. With the rain that far north, that means that only a part of the very dry area of the [...]

Read Full Post »

Tuesday, August 23, 2011:  It is unusual to see big changes in corn and soybean crop ratings late in the growing season, which makes this week’s three percentage point drop in national corn ratings in the good/excellent category that much more notable. The crop is now rated at 57 percent good/excellent (versus 60 percent last [...]

Read Full Post »

Monday, August 22, 2011:  If one were to split the Midwest up into thirds from the southwest to the northeast, then it continues to be the southwestern third and the northeastern third that is doing the best on rainfall while the middle third (which admittedly is where most of the corn and soybeans are grown) [...]

Read Full Post »

Friday, August 19, 2011: The best rains in the Midwest over the past 24 hours were where they were forecast to be, which is in western and southwestern parts of the region. Southeastern South Dakota, eastern Nebraska, southwestern Iowa, northeastern Kansas, and much of Missouri are all areas that saw at least a half inch [...]

Read Full Post »