Air June 14, 2000

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. The July like weather returns and just in time for a rather early wheat harvest. I’ve spent a little bit of time doing some digging, and this may be just about as early a start to harvest as I’ve seen. I know a little bit of test cutting occurred on June 7th or 8th and a lot more got started the first of this week. The earliest that I could remember prior was in that pathetic wheat crop year of 1989, and I think that was probable around this time that that harvest started. So it may not be a record, but if it isn’t, it’s a pretty close second!

While many of you are thinking about getting harvest started or finished, I’m thinking about what comes along next. Given the warm and dry weather we are going to see shrunken and shriveled kernels. Some of these will make their way into the truck, but a lot of them will make it back into the wheat field. Now, even though these are so shrunken up that they blew on through the combine, they will still sprout. Of course, we’re going to have to have rain before that will probably happen, but we can probably expect a very good potential for a large volunteer wheat crop at least sometime later this summer. This can be very critical because we have so many insects and disease pests that do better when they have a bridge to get them through the summer and until the new wheat comes up in the fall. When we can eliminate this insect and disease bridge, we help reduce some of those devastating crop problems that we can have. Once you do start to get a flush of volunteer wheat, use herbicide or tillage to knock it down. I know that occasionally producers may want to keep this stuff around as a volunteer late summer or early fall forage crop. And this year especially, that may be a very legitimate reason. Well, it probably won’t sprout until we have a rain, so why not work the field up and plant a better emergency forage such as triticale? In between wheat harvest and all that other work, we may very well have a great opportunity to do some deep soil tillage work. Field after field that I have been in this spring have shown at least minor soil compaction problems. Soil compaction occurs from our machinery, and, unless you’re willing to wait 500 years, it will only go away through our actions. To do any good, soil ripping must be done when the soil is dry. Boy does this sound like an excellent opportunity to do that!

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

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