Air July 5, 2000

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. The weather the past few days has certainly let us know that we are in the middle of a Kansas summer! Regardless of what your level of outdoor activity, you need to watch yourself, your friends and coworkers in these high heat stress days and make sure everyone is okay. Remember to drink lots of fluids and those should be water or fruit juices. Anything with caffeine or alcohol is not an effective replaced of body fluids, no matter how good they may taste at the time. Caffeine and alcohol both act as diuretics which means that they simply cause you to get rid of water faster. And remember to take regular breaks when working outside. Even if you think you are used to this weather, just slow down a little bit and stay safe and healthy. A tired or heat stressed worker is not a safe worker, don’t let one problem lead to another!

A lot of the crops are looking pretty good right now. With this weather, I think you really can watch the crops grow. We have been seeing a couple of things going on with soybeans right now though. I’ve had quite a few calls about cupped and curled leaves on soybeans. In virtually all cases this has been from use of phenoxy herbicides (read that to mean the 2,4-D or Banvel like compounds) close to or upwind from the soybean fields. There was a lot of pasture spraying going on earlier this month when it was windy. It doesn’t matter whether you were spraying with a ground rig, aerial application, or heaven forbid, one of those nasty mist blowers, these products will move. If you are standing downwind and can smell 2,4-D, then the vapors are strong enough for damage to be seen on sensitive crops like soybeans. In all the cases that I’ve seen so far, we were just looking at leaf cupping. New leaves were coming out that looked fine and I don’t think we’ll see any permanent damage. If we start seeing stem twisting and deformation though, we are into another level of damage and we many need to talk! We’ve also been seeing some pale looking, light green soybean fields. In some cases the innoculant did not get going because of dry weather. And in some cases no innoculant was applied. We could top dress with 30 to 40 pounds of N and fix this, but by now it is questionable if you could do enough good to justify it. If you have questions or concerns, give me a call!

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

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