It was a busy Labor Day holiday weekend, for hundreds of USDA expert crop innumerators who visited farms nationwide in an effort to complete objective yield evaluations of crops for the upcoming USDA Crop Production Report. NASS' Lance Honig said those evaluators were scheduled to look at 7,800 field plots of corn, soybeans, and cotton, checking a variety of issues, including crop maturity levels.

"Since things do vary so much across the country we need to make sure that we're making the appropriate counts for where that crop is in the development process. So count the number of plants, if it's corn then eventually they'll be counting the number of ears."

What about crops that vary in development?

"They'll actually be harvesting fruit from these plots within the fields sending them off to our laboratory in St. Louis where we can actually weigh; take some further measurements."

All of these objective measurements, plus satellite data, plus a yield survey of 9000 farmers will go into USDA's Crop Production Report when it comers out September 10th.

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