Air July 12, 2000

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. I had the opportunity to sit in on a teleconference phone call Monday. And while we may think we’ve had it tough at times this year, we may be one of the few garden spots in the state, so to speak. Fields of dryland crops in western Kansas are being abandoned and corn fields in southeastern Kansas may very well start going into the silo by this weekend if they don’t receive an inch of rain. But, since we can’t do much about the weather, let’s get on to other things this morning. Be on the lookout for soybean plants that suddenly wilt down. There are several things that could be going on here and we really need to start tracking some of these down. You may think it’s just dry weather, but there are several other things it’s liable to be! If you start to see problems, give me a call!

I’ve seen some prairie hay down, but we need to see a lot more go down. We are having entirely too much prairie hay harvested in August and even early September. Hay harvested after August 1 doesn’t do much good for the cattle and it certainly doesn’t do any good for the grass plant itself. Native grasses obtain maximum crude protein levels very early in the growing season and then drop off very predictably throughout the growing season. Sometime in late July the protein content drops below 5% which marks the cut off for any forage. Anything below 5% should not be used for livestock feed. Once we cut that hay, we know what the plants try to do next. They start to regrow. If they don’t, we know we’ve got big problems. The plants are going to take about 8 more weeks of growth, after cutting, before they can maximize root reserves. These root reserves are what the plant will use next spring to get off to a good growing start. The native warm season grasses are going to pretty well be through growing by the end of September. If we cut in late August, then we’ve only give the plant half the time it needs to store up its food reserves. Several years of this kind of management and you will have weed and brush problems and invasion by undesirable grasses. What this all means is that you need to be cutting prairie hay now and getting it all done by the end of July.

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

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