You could lose almost every hair in your head, scratching your head to figure out why corn yields are headed up, soybeans yields down from August estimates, in a year with above-normal temperature and below-normal rainfall for the three summer months weather folks call the traditional summer- June, July and August. The same year features nearly double 90+ days at Indianapolis, and across much of the state. What’s especially unusual, weathermen say, is how late the last 90+ day occurred, bringing a string of blazing-hot days to a close. Assuming the mercury doesn’t push up past 90 again, which weathermen have their fingers crossed that it won’t, the last one occurred at Indianapolis on Sept. 24, at 92 degrees. That was an all-time record for September 24th in the circle city. The latest date ever recorded of a 90+ reading at Indianapolis is October 4.

Ken Scheeringa, of the Indiana state climate office, located at Purdue University, along with the Midwest Regional Climate Center, says that by drilling down through weather data, you can begin to explain why crops turned out as they did across the Hoosier state this year. Believe it or not, east-central Indiana is the only one of the nine Indiana crop reporting districts now forecast to have lower corn yields than the five-year average, according to Greg Preston and his staff at the Indiana Ag Statistics office, part of the National Ag Statistics Service. It’s a different picture with soybeans, however, with all but northwest and north-central Indiana ready to post yields below the five-year average, and even those two expected to fall short of ’06 soybean yields.
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