The Fastline Blog

Thursday, August 18, 2011: The middle third of the Corn Belt, in an area running from the northwest to the southeast, is an area that remains badly in need of rainfall given that most of that region has seen very little rain so far this month…or longer. As I have noted here on several occasions, [...]

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Wednesday, August 17, 2011: Significant rainfall the past 24 hours in the Midwest was confined to portions of the southern half of Iowa southward into central Missouri, and a small area of eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin. 24 hour amounts through 7:00 AM CDT include 1.99″ at Lamoni, IA, 1.58″ at Creston, IA, 0.82″ at [...]

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Tuesday, August 16, 2011: Very little change was noted this week in national corn crop ratings. One percent of the crop moved from the “excellent” to the “good” category, while one percent of the crop improved from the “very poor” to the “fair” category. Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska were the states seeing the [...]

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Monday, August 15, 2011: Rainfall over the weekend was a major disappoint to the western Corn Belt, particularly for Iowa where basically nothing fell in southeastern, south- central, central, and northwestern parts of the state. The same is true for northwestern Illinois. Rainfall to the east of there was better with a lot of places [...]

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Early in this week there was very little in the way of new fundamentals impacting the commodity markets and mostly traded the news of the S&P downgrade of the US debt market.  We also started getting reports from area farmers that have been out in their fields doing yield checks and have come back in [...]

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Friday, August 12, 2011: Very nice rains were recorded overnight in far western Iowa westward, with radar estimating rains of over an inch west of the Missouri River and notable rains still falling in that same area at the time of this writing. I can confirm Nebraska rainfall totals of 1.44″ at Falls City, 1.47″ [...]

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Thursday, August 11, 2011: Yesterday was about the coolest day we have seen across the Midwest since sometime back in June as highs were mostly in the upper 70s and lower 80s. We’ve got a lot more where that came from, as highs in the 75 to 85 degree range are likely right through Tuesday [...]

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Wednesday, August 10, 2011: Make no mistake that the drought in the southern Plains is historic in nature and it is going to take a tremendous amount of work on the part of Mother Nature to get things back to anything close to normal there (with the beginning of winter wheat planting not that far [...]

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Tuesday, August 9, 2011: Though we moderated temperatures nicely late last week, the fact that it was so hot early last week and the fact that not everyone got a good rain kept pressure this week on national corn ratings. Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, and Wisconsin all saw deteriorating ratings of varying degrees [...]

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Monday, August 8, 2011: Best rains and best coverage of rain over the weekend in the Midwest, was in the west, southwest, south, and extreme east as we saw a lot of places in south-central South Dakota, eastern Nebraska, northeastern Kansas, the southern two-thirds of Missouri, the southern third of Illinois, far southern Indiana, and [...]

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