Crop Progress: Wheat Harvest Nearly Complete as Corn and Soybean Advance Toward Maturity

Aug 13, 2025

For the week ending Aug. 10, 2025, Nebraska’s field crops continued to advance under warm, mostly dry conditions that kept combines and irrigation systems busy. Many producers wrapped up wheat harvest while monitoring late-summer moisture needs for corn and soybean. Topsoil moisture rated 3% very short, 21% short, 66% adequate and 10% surplus, while subsoil moisture rated 6% very short, 23% short, 65% adequate and 6% surplus. Statewide, fieldwork averaged 5.1 days suitable for the week.

Field Crops Report:

Corn
- Silking was 93% — behind 99% in 2024 and the five-year average of 97%.
- Dough stage was 59% — behind 61% last year and 62% for the five-year average.
- Dented was 15% — behind 23% last year but near the five-year average of 14%.
- Condition rated 1% very poor, 3% poor, 20% fair, 49% good and 27% excellent.

Source : unl.edu

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.