Planting one year after the derecho

May 03, 2021

The damage to the 2020 crop was the worst Marty Danzer had ever seen on his farm

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

As U.S. farmers continue with the 2021 planting season, many producers are seeding crops one year after a devastating storm caused millions of dollars of damage in crop loss.

Marty Danzer, a Carroll, Iowa cash crop producer, for example, wrapped up soybean seeding over the weekend and finished planting corn a week before that.

It’s his farm’s first crop after a derecho affected communities in South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio in August 2020. In total the storm traveled about 770 miles in 14 hours.

The storm and its 100 mile-per-hour winds damaged about 10 million acres of crops in Iowa alone – Danzer’s among them.

“We didn’t lose any buildings, but we lost a lot of crop. There was corn that was so flat you couldn’t get underneath it with a corn head,” he told Farms.com. “There was probably 30 to 40 bushels per acre of corn on the ground. We had some cattle clean it up, but they couldn’t get all of it.”

Seeing the damage on his farm was hard, he said.

“It was frustrating,” he said. “Farming is labor-intensive, we invest in our operations, and then to see (the derecho) happen, it fatigues you.”

But as the 2021 planting season approached, Danzer prepared to do his very best to give his crops the best chance to succeed.

He planted about 550 acres of soybeans, around 600 acres of corn and used the proper varieties and hybrids for this farm’s conditions.

“For corn we usually plant anywhere from 106-day corn to 110-day corn and we’ve had pretty good success with that,” he said. “And for soybeans we usually plant anywhere from a 2.4 to a 2.9 variety. Over the years the earlier-maturity varieties used to have a little more yield drag.”

With his planting season finished, Danzer is hoping Mother Nature will be a little more cooperative than she was in 2020.

“We got the seeds in the ground and now we need the timely rains,” he said. “We’re off to a better start than last year but we’re a bit dry.”

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.