Air June 7, 2000

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. I wish we’d have a few more days like Monday and Tuesday instead of what they have forecast for the rest of the week! The wheat would do better with a slower dry down, but I guess we’ll just have to live with what we’ve got.

We’ve been seeing quite a few chinch bugs moving out of wheat. If you don’t have milo planted yet, you may want to hold off for a week or so now. The ground’s dry in locations, and maybe we can get the chinch bugs dispersed as much as possible. We’re also seeing a little bit of herbicide damage in some fields. The main culprit is lack of rain or downpours combined with some unusually warm weather. Don’t panic on replanting and don’t tear it out until I’ve had a chance to check it out. Most of the time, seedling plants will outgrow this early damage with nominal yield loss. What we do know is that with moisture potentially being at a premium, at least in some parts of the county, we want to conserve as much as we can.

Pasture managers, it is going to be very very important to monitor the condition of your pastures this summer. A lot of pastures came out of last year in pretty tough shape. Since then we’ve had hit and miss rainstorms. Pastures can deal with a lot of abuse early in the spring. You can literally graze them to the ground. But they have to have the last half of the season to recover. Consider July 15th as a drop dead date. If at that time, you have very little grass in your pasture you must get the cattle out of there. If you don’t, the pasture won’t have a chance to recover and you’ll be heading into several years of pasture decline. This problem is only going to get worse if the weather stays on the dry side. If you have a pasture that’s heavily grazed in the first half of the summer and then hot dry weather sets in, you will have problems. As we graze through June check those pastures on a weekly basis, if not more often. If the grass is not moving ahead of the grazing you’d better be ready to move cattle out by early July. You can’t rely on magic formulas or anybody’s guess. You have to be watching the pastures and reading the grass to know if it’s time to move out!

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

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