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NASS Days Suitable for Fieldwork

22 Dec 2023 05:30 AM
The IEM has recently been working on wrangling a new dataset based on the weekly Iowa crop reporting districts reports found here. These reports contain an estimate of the number of days over the past week that were suitable for fieldwork. With data back to 1974, but with some limited holes, the featured chart attempts to reproduce the climatology of this value by day of the year. The weekly values are evenly weighted to a daily probability and then averaged over the period of record. The resulting chart looks awesome and nicely illustrates some aspects of the difficulties of agriculture in Iowa. The most important time of year to be in the field is to plant and the months of April and May have the lowest frequencies found over the growing season! The highest frequencies are found over the second half of the growing season when rainfall events decrease in frequency and spatial extent vs spring. The plotted colors were selected to highlight north to south differences with the northern tier clearly lagging in April, but then an interesting lag over southern Iowa is found during May. The dip in frequencies over the end of May may be more explained by data collection difficulties during the Memorial Day holiday weekend than a physical process ongoing in the state. The IEM website doesn't have much to offer with this dataset yet, but a general landing page is available and tooling will come with time.

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Tags:   nass   suitable   fieldwork  

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Days Suitable for Field Work

03 May 2023 05:30 AM
The weekly USDA NASS update released every Monday includes an estimate of the number of statewide days over the past seven days that were suitable for field work. This value is provided at the statewide level and so there are plenty of caveats to consider. The value for 30 April was reported as 4.8 days for Iowa, which is a good number to make crop planting progress. The technicolor dream of a daily feature chart presents the accumulated suitable days for Iowa each year since 1995. The accumulated value for this year stands at 17 days, so the X denotes each previous year's date with a similar value. One can see that we are well ahead of the pace set in 2022, but in line with 2020 and 2021. A number of previous years readily stick out including the difficult spring seasons of 2013 and 2019. The drought year of 2012 is a significant outlier as warm temperatures and persistent drought allowed for rapid accumulation of suitable days.

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Tags:   nass   fieldwork