Kossuth Iowa Corn Yield USDA NASS 1990-2022

Corn Belt county yield prediction dataset: crop progress, condition, and detrended target for a single high-production county in the US Corn Belt.

Kossuth County, Iowa is one of the top corn-producing counties in the United States. In 2022 it produced ~62.8 million bushels (~1.59 million metric tons) — approximately 0.46% of total US corn production, equivalent to ~41.8% of total Polish corn production. This makes it an excellent single-location benchmark for crop-yield ML.

The dataset combines three USDA NASS data streams (1990–2022):

Annual corn grain yield at county level (Kossuth, Iowa)

Weekly Crop Progress reports at state level (Iowa)

Weekly Crop Condition reports at state level (Iowa)

Raw API data is provided alongside a processed, model-ready dataset (n=33 years × 15 columns) with engineered features: phenology timing (week of 50% planted/silking/mature/harvested), condition aggregates (Good+Excellent and Poor+VeryPoor across full season, silking window, and Jul–Aug grain fill period), linear technology trend, and detrended yield target.

Recommended ML target: yield_detrended = yield − linear trend. Isolates weather/environmental signal from long-term technology gains (~+2 BU/ACRE/year reflecting hybrid and agronomic improvements).

Suggested tasks: K-NN regression with Leave-One-Out CV (small n=33), correlation analysis between condition index and yield, phenology trend analysis, anomaly detection (1993 flood: −61 BU; 2012 drought: −17 BU).

Source: USDA NASS QuickStats API (public domain). Compiled at: FarmerPlanner / Demeter AgTech for educational and benchmarking use.

This dataset is also mirrored on Kaggle: kossuth-corn-yield-iowa.