The Fastline Blog

August 4, 2010 National corn ratings were down a touch this past week, but that took place without much deterioration in major producing stations. We actually saw some modest improvement in corn ratings for states like Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska and Minnesota (Minnesota crop now an incredible 90 percent good/excellent; forty percent in the excellent category [...]

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August 3, 2010 National corn ratings were down a touch this past week, but that took place without much deterioration in major producing stations. We actually saw some modest improvement in corn ratings for states like Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska and Minnesota (Minnesota crop now an incredible 90 percent good/excellent; forty percent in the excellent category [...]

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August 2, 2010 The month of August is picking up right where our wet month of July left off, as a fresh batch of thunderstorms was producing some locally heavy rains in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa early on this Monday. This past month will go into the record books as one of the wettest [...]

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Friday, July 30, 2010: Expected thunderstorms have fired this morning in northwestern parts of the Corn Belt, and when one combines those rains with rains that fell during the day yesterday, we have seen some locally heavy rainfall totals of two inches or more for southeastern South Dakota and parts of northwestern Iowa (and several [...]

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Thursday, July 29, 2010: Summertime thunderstorm activity is often times a “hit and miss” affair, where in a lot of cases you either get a big rain or your get nothing. That was certainly the case in the southeastern half of the Corn Belt yesterday afternoon and evening. A big swath of real estate located [...]

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Wednesday, July 28, 2010: Thunderstorms fired late yesterday in the northwestern Corn Belt along a cool front moving into that area, and this activity moved eastward overnight to bring decent rains (though certainly nothing heavy like was so common last week) to southeastern South Dakota, Minnesota, northern Iowa, and northwestern Wisconsin. It looks like most [...]

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Tuesday, July 27 2010: While the total amount of corn and soybeans in the good/excellent category this week was unchanged from a week ago, a closer examination shows that we did see a fairly substantial movement from the “good” to the “excellent” category so in that respect we did see improvement. Iowa corn was a [...]

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Monday,  July 26, 2010: Wet weather early in the weekend capped off what was an incredibly wet week of weather for a lot of the Midwest. Not much rain has fallen in the Corn Belt over the past 24 hours, but the 48 hour period ending Sunday morning featured extensive rain across much of the [...]

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Friday, July 23, 2010: For the third time this week, heavy rains in parts of the Corn Belt will have to be noted by corn and soybean traders. It was southeastern Iowa and northeastern Missouri that had the heavy rain this past Monday morning, then northwestern Iowa and southeastern South Dakota yesterday morning, and now [...]

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Thursday, July 22, 2010: Thoughts presented in this report yesterday that the heaviest near-term rains in the Midwest would be shifting further north than where they had been so far this week has proven correct, as early morning radar on this Thursday showed widespread rainfall largely north of Interstate 80 in Nebraska and Iowa. Some [...]

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