Corn Yield App, an on-Farm Tool for Estimating Corn Yields.

Forecasting corn yields before harvest is not an easy task. Corn farmers want to start making on-farm yield estimations after the crop reaches flowering time. The major yield components for corn are 1) number of ears per unit of area, 2) the total number of kernels per ear, and 3) kernels per pound (grain weight). On-farm estimation of the first component can be performed by following a simplified approach on counting plants in constant row length and quantifying ears within the defined area. Kernel number is manually counted, but this process is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Therefore, imagery analysis could assist in facilitating kernel number count for corn at the on-farm scale. An improvement of the estimation of the kernel number component can assist producers in forecasting corn yields before harvest. Following this rationale, more than 100 corn ears were individually screening with imagery collection and kernel number was manually counted. Imagery collected from all individual ears was correlated to the final kernel number. An electronic application is currently under development with the goal not only of estimating final kernel number in corn but also with the final objective of forecasting on-farm corn yields before harvest. Development of this application and field evaluations are follow-up steps in the process of validating the tool including the essential step of developing educational materials for the technology transfer objective.