Air August 16, 2000

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. Just a quick reminder to be out scouting your fields for insect problems. Beans and milo both are going to have the greatest current risk. Keep an eye on those wheat stubble fields and if you’re wanting to get some alfalfa planted it’s just about time.

Got a question for you this morning. Are you still cutting prairie hay? STOP! By now the quality is starting to go down hill so fast that while the tonnage may be great, the quality stinks. Remember the celery diet of several years ago. You were supposed to load up on celery. It’d fill you up and it took more energy to digest it than you got out of it. Low quality prairie hay is the original celery diet for cattle. Not only will it not provide adequate nutrition itself, but it will decrease how much other food they’ll eat. The old double whammy you might say! Cutting this late also does a lot of long term damage to the grass stand itself. The desirable grasses don’t have adequate time to recover before they stop growing for the season. And if, like some of us feel, we have an early fall frost, it’ll just make the problem worse. AS the desirable grasses lose vigor, the desirable grasses, some cool season, some warm season, start to become more invasive and become a greater part of the mix. You wind up with a real mess and more brush and weeds to boot. If all you are interested in is bedding hay or mulch, just wait until October. By then the stuff really has stopped growing and it doesn’t matter what you do. Another pasture question. Are you still trying to spray brush to control it. Well, you can still get control, but we’re definitely past the prime time. Basal bark treatments or cut stump treatments will certainly work well now, but foliage sprays will not be quite as effective. You can try it, just be forewarned that a follow-up treatment early next June, the preferred time for most species, may very well be in order. Are you seeing a lot of that yellow broomweed moving in right now? If there’s a lot, it’s probably a symptom of overgrazing. It comes on late in the year and is predominantly only where there’s bare soil. This would put it around salt or water or anywhere that you’ve overgrazed. August, a great time to be checking up on your pasture management!

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

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