Air May 17, 2000

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. I just checked the web site for soil temperatures and this is probably the last spring report I’ll make about soil temps. Both weekly high and low temperatures are up into the mid to upper 60’s, as is the average so soil temps should no longer be a limiting factor for planting. Row crop producers, you need to be keeping an eye on your young crops. We’re picking up a fair amount of flea beetle and cutworm damage in corn. Soybean producers, I’ve been seeing a lot of Bean Leaf Beetles. Any of these may require treatment. Contact me for more information on treatment thresholds. Milo growers, we’re seeing chinch bugs in the wheat, and some of this wheat is a little on the thin side. Right now the wheat is green enough to hold the chinch bugs, but it’s going to start to turn before long and the chinch bugs will be on the move. Be forewarned.

Last fall we had some grant money to do some forage testing for hay producers. What we found was rather disconcerting. Brome grass samples were consistently running 30 to 50% below what we consider to be normal values for protein. Why is this? Two major reasons. To some extent, the weather in any given year will dictate forage quality. But what we are also seeing, based on the harvest dates that producers gave us, was bromegrass that was being cut weeks later than it should have been. We had a 6 week wet spell last year that bunched up a lot of field work. I will allow that much. But we don’t seem to be having that occur this year, so we need to work on timely harvesting. In the past, I think we’ve been waiting too long to harvest. The old rule of thumb was to harvest at the bloom stage. This was easy to see as the pollen would come dusting off the fields like a cloud of smoke with the early morning breezes. The problem is that we see this, we make a mental note, and then it’s another 3 to 5 days before we final pull in with the swather. This may very well be making us as much as 10 days later than we should be. We need to be trying to get that bromegrass swathed BEFORE it starts to bloom. Shoot for early heading, and if ¼ of the heads are still just coming out of the boot, then that’s just fine. If you’re harvesting for quality, then you have to cut it early. If all you need is bedding, then go ahead and wait until after it blooms to maximize tonnage.

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2000.

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