We show growers what the crop is doing now, while there is still time to act.
Most crop numbers arrive after harvest. By then the decisions are made. This site reads satellites and weather stations through the season, so the picture lands in July and August while irrigation, harvest order and marketing are still open questions.
It is built by Multigrain International with GISit, and it covers the dry beans, chickpeas and field peas of the High Plains: western Nebraska, eastern Colorado, southeast Wyoming and northwest Kansas.
What we measure, and what we cannot see
- Greenness, from USDA satellite imagery, on each crop's own ground.
- Rain and temperature, from one fixed weather station per region, so a season is never compared against a different station's record.
- Heat during flowering, when hot days kill flowers and pods.
- Planted acres, from USDA's own published count by crop type.
- Irrigated ground, from a USGS satellite survey. Dry beans here sit on ground that is 21% to 51% irrigated depending on the area; chickpeas and peas sit on much drier ground.
- Whether your field is watered. We now know how much of the ground in each area is irrigated, but not which fields. From space a watered field and a rained-on field still look the same.
- Variety. Two fields of the same crop can differ by a third.
- Disease and hail, until they are large enough to change the colour of a field.
- Your own field. We look at whole counties. You farm certain fields, and they can be better or worse than the county around them.
Where this site disagrees with your own records, your records are right. Telling us is what fixes it.
We do not change our numbers after harvest
In August we tell you what we think the crop will make. In November the real yield comes in. We never go back and change what we said in August.
That is how you can check us. If we said 2,100 pounds and the crop made 1,800, it stays on the record where you can see it.
It is also what makes the number worth having. Anything that waits for harvest is just history. You need a number in August, while you can still do something about it.
We do use yields from years that finished before this season started. Those set the starting point we work up or down from.
What we have gotten wrong
Anyone can show you their good days. Here is what we have gotten wrong. Read it before you decide whether to trust the rest.
| What went wrong | What it did | What we changed |
|---|---|---|
| We dropped blackeye peas | We said the crop was not grown near here. USDA records about 10,200 acres in Colorado and 5,700 in Nebraska. It was being grown; the acreage was simply withheld because too few farms report it. | The crop list is no longer our opinion. It is built straight from USDA's published table every day. |
| Our first yield model was not sound | An outside review found several steps resting on constants we could not source. We withdrew the figure rather than defend it. | Rebuilt to compare this season against eleven past seasons of the same measurements, which cancels out the parts we cannot pin down. It is published as a range, and we say plainly it is not a proven forecast. |
| One satellite pass stood in for a whole season | Chickpeas read 16% above normal on a single day when the season to that point was 4% below. The sign was wrong, not just the size. | Every comparison now averages the whole season so far against the same stretch of past seasons. |
| A temperature conversion was wrong | A 90°F heat threshold printed on the page as 58°F. | Fixed, and the page is now checked against the numbers behind it automatically. |
| Five regions shared one cache file | Four regions displayed a fifth region's satellite data while the logs reported success. | Fixed, and a failed download is never again stored as though it were an answer. |
We would rather publish this than be asked for it.
Talk to us
If a number here is wrong, if you want this run on your own ground, or if you want to know how something works, this comes straight to us.
Why we build this
A grower deciding when to cut and a buyer deciding what to commit to are asking the same question: what is the crop doing now? That question has good answers sitting in satellite and weather records every week of the season. They are just not usually pointed at the people who need them in time to act.
The rest of this page tells you what we miss and where we have been wrong, so you can decide how much to lean on it.