The 2005 crop season was drier than usual: by April 19 the federal drought monitoring office marked the NE corner of the state as “Abnormally Dry,” and by July 26 they mapped “Extreme” drought in the SE corner, “Severe” all along the eastern one-third of the state, and “Moderate” everywhere else (wwww.drought.unl.edu/dm/archives). Corn leaves were tightly curled across much of the state by mid-July; rainfall for the April-August period at the Arlington Agricultural Experiment Station was the third lowest (between 1989 and 1988; 1962 is the record low) in the 44 years of record there.

Yet remarkably the official USDA statewide average yield is predicted to be a new record, at 150 bu/acre, a nearly 5% increase over the previous record set in 1999. UWEX Corn Agronomist Joe Lauer (Lauer, 2005) reports that at 10 of 12 sites of the UW hybrid corn performance trials yields were solidly above the 10-year average, most by more than 10%. It was indeed a year in which the corn crop “pulled it off,” delivering across much of the state great yields, inspite of what was officially a drought year. I share here some “back-of-the-envelope” calculations to show that this remarkable performance is understandable (at least in retrospect).