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How the season has gone
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Tell us where this is wrong
If a number here does not match what you see in your field, you are right and we want to know. Tell us about a wrong number, ask a question, or name a place we should be covering.
More detail: how this works and what it rests on
HOW THE CROP LOOKSLOADINGNeeds both the satellite moisture and the greenness reading.
MOISTURE AT THE ROOTSLOADINGNASA satellite, top metre of soil, against a normal year.
HOW GREEN THE CROP ISLOADINGWeekly USDA satellite greenness, and which way it is going.
AGAINST A NORMAL YEAR—Measured against what pinto actually made in past years.
HOW WELL WE HAVE CHECKED ITLOADINGTested by holding one year back at a time. We do not invent a confidence figure.
In plain English: We work out the yield ourselves. USDA tells us how many acres went in the ground. USDA’s final yield is only ever used to check our work, never to make it.
WHAT THE CROP HAS DONE SO FAR
The season laid out by how much heat the crop has had
Growth stage is worked out from heat the crop has collected since about 50°F, starting from an estimated planting date. If you tell us the real date you planted, we use yours instead.
MODEL DATE —
Detail for the area you picked
2026 HIGH PLAINS DRY BEANS · STILL EXPERIMENTAL
Working out the estimate…
Loading the yield estimate, plus moisture, greenness, crop ground and weather station readings.
OUR YIELD ESTIMATE, MID-SEASON—Loading…
We never feed USDA’s current yield into this
AREA YOU ARE LOOKING AT
Nebraska Panhandle
Loading this week’s satellite moisture reading.
Counted from when the crop started growing.
Growing degree days for dry beans, counted from 50°F.
The part of the season we have actually measured.
Our yield times USDA’s acres, as they stood on this date.
Our own estimate, and the readings that back it up
WHERE EVERY NUMBER COMES FROM
Sources behind what you are seeing
We keep four things apart and label them: what was measured, what was modelled, what was worked out from those, and what we simply assumed.
HOW THIS WORKS
Where the yield number comes from
WHAT WE MEASURE
Greenness, from USDA satellite pictures. For dry beans we read only the ground USDA marks as beans. For chickpeas and peas we read one point per county, which is weaker, and we say so where it matters. Rain and temperature come from one weather station per region. Sunlight is measured too, by NASA satellites. If that feed goes down we fall back to an estimate from the day’s high and low, and the data file records which one was used.
WHERE THE NUMBER COMES FROM
We run the same calculation over this season and over the last eleven seasons, then compare them. Comparing the two cancels out the parts we cannot pin down. We apply that comparison to what the crop actually made in past years, so the number starts from real harvests and moves with what we see this season. An outside review found problems in an earlier version and we took that number down. What is published now is a range, not a single figure, and we do not call it a proven forecast.
PLANTING DATE IS MOSTLY THE CALENDAR
We start from the normal planting date for each crop. Weather can push it later, never earlier. There is no test in the code for whether the ground was dry enough to work, even though this page once said there was. In 2026 nearly every crop came out on its normal date in all seven regions. Treat the planting date as an assumption, not a measurement.
EVERY CROP, EVERY AREA
Six crops across seven growing areas. Each one has its own planting date, its own heat limits and its own idea of when it is ripe. Rebuilt every morning from public data that needs no account and no key.
What this cannot do. This is not a proven forecast. The starting level comes from real past harvests and we stand behind that part. Putting one season ahead of another is the weak part: checked against USDA from 2016 to 2023, we did not get the order right. USDA is what we check ourselves against, and it moves too. It changed Nebraska’s 2026 planted acres by 21% in the middle of the season. It counts yield only on acres that were actually cut, so a field someone walked away from disappears from the record. It stopped publishing county yields in 2008. Dryness is read in one-kilometre squares, so every reading mixes crop ground with whatever sits next to it. That makes each crop look drier than it really is. We now measure how much of the ground in each area is irrigated, but not whether any one field is watered. We do not see variety, disease, hail, or how a field is farmed.