Air August 2, 2000

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. I want to express a big thank you to all the 4-Hers, parents and volunteers that helped make the county fair last week such a success. Also a thank you to Mark, Larry and Korina for their live coverage from the fairgrounds. Without all of you, an event like this just wouldn’t happen, let alone be the big success that it is.

We’re sort of at that in between time. There’s not a lot that needs to be done on the current growing crops. A little bit early yet to be working ground for alfalfa or wheat, although you do want to be checking the status of the volunteer wheat in your wheat stubble and making plans for controlling that by the start of September. Now is a good time to be looking at your current crop fields and trying to diagnosis problems. Granted, it’ll be too late to correct them for this year, BUT you’ll have a headstart on next year. I spent part of yesterday morning walking a corn field with a producer. The corn seemed to be dying early, or at the very least there was some awfully quick dry down occuring. We took with us a sharp shooter, a soil probe and a knife. There were a lot of hears already hanging down. Good kernel set, but a lot of the kernels were on the small side. They weren’t shrunken or shriveled so the plant hadn’t died real early. The first plant I dug up was showing a lot of platy soil structure high up in the soil profile. You could stick the shovel in almost anywhere and find some hard soil. It wasn’t dry hard, there was still moisture, but there were some definite compacted areas. Pretty good root development, but definitely enough compaction to be some impediment. There was part of the problem. The soil probe went down very hard until you got past 18 inches. There was some moisture in that top 18 inches, but once you got into the 1½ to 2½ foot range there was a lot more moisture. There obviously were not many roots deeper than 18 inches and this was not heavy nasty soil. Then I started to push on stalks. Several of them busted over at the bottom with very little effort. Splitting them open showed a lot of advanced charcoal rot stalk rot. All of these problems were feeding off of each other. We learned a lot yesterday morning and there were some plans being changed. But we wouldn’t be on top of this if we hadn’t spent a little time in the field.

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

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