The National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Land Model (NCAR CLM2) is coupled to the Florida State University (FSU) regional climate model to improve the seasonal land surface climate and to apply its output to the CERES-maize (Crop Environment Resource Syntheis) crop model. The regional model is placed over the Southeast United States and run at 20 km resolution, roughly resolving the county level. Outputs from the models (max/min surface temperature, precipitation, and shortwave radiation at the surface) are used as inputs into the crop model to determine the crop yields. Simulations with the atmospheric model coupled with the CLM2 (hereafter, FSUCLM) are compared to the control (FSUc, The FSU simplified land surface scheme includes a three layer soil temperature model based on the force-restore method). Results show that the FSUCLM experiment improves the seasonal simulation relative to the control in the regional model. Noticeable improvements were found in the simulation of the surface temperature, evaporation, and latent heat fluxes. The CLM2 reduces much of the surface temperature cold bias noted in the FSUc run. The inclusion of the CLM2 helps produce better crop yield forecasts.