Welcome to Martell Crop Projections

Martellcropprojections.com offers a unique research tool in the weather- agriculture business. In this world of information overload, the farmer, trader, or marketer is inundated with daily forecasts, radar charts, satellite photos, and market news. But what does it all mean beyond today? Martellcropprojections.com provides expert monitoring and crop analysis to guide you through the growing season. But there’s something more, a realistic projection of final crop production.

A powerful relational database ties together weather and crop statistics at the district level. Crop production estimates by district are based on an analog approach where current weather conditions are matched to a previous growing season. Yields are then assigned to each district according to historical results.

Weather and crop statistics go back to 1950 providing 55 years of historical data to be searched for an appropriate match.
Historical temperature and precipitation data is collected at the district level which represents an average of towns and villages within that region. This is more representative of growing conditions than point data, particularly for summer rainfall.
Yields have trended upward since 1950 due to advancements in technology -- improved seed varieties, better use of chemicals and fertilizers, and innovative planting and harvesting techniques. A "technology trend line" yield is developed by running a regression analysis on the 51 data points. Each crop year’s yield may then be described as a percent deviation from the technology trend yield. In this manner, yields are normalized over the 51-year period.
Corn, soybean, winter wheat, and spring wheat estimates are generated using this technique.
The method assumes that any deviation from the trend yield is due to the weather. In other words, if the weather were average, the actual yield would exactly equal the trend yield. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, the 1970 corn blight, for example. Incidence of "sudden death syndrome" among last year’s soybeans would be another example where yields would be revised downward, contrary to historical evidence.
In cases of extreme weather, when no analog year may be found, a best "guesstimate" is employed. The relentless rains of the 1993 crop season is an example of this.

Gail Martell has a Master’s degree in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her background in the commodity business spanned 13 years, from the late 1970s to 1990, as the weather/crop analyst for E F Hutton. She has spoken at numerous agricultural conventions, including the National Association of Wheat Growers and many State Corn and Soybean Growers conventions. She was interviewed on the McNeil Lehrer program concerning the 1988 drought and was a speaker at the 1988 Midwest Governor’s Conference on Drought. From 1992 to 1997 she worked in the academic field, teaching meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. During the past 3 years, she has been developing a weather/crop database for use by agricultural interests.