Air August 23, 2000

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. For those of you who have been trying to reach me the past two weeks, yes, I am back in the office. More on where I’ve been in just a minute. Just a follow up from a previous comment about stalk rot. As this hot dry weather continues the stock rot problems will only get worse. It will hit corn, sorghum and soybeans without discrimination. All you can do at this point is be ready to roll with harvest as soon as possible once it is ready. These organisms are around all the time, they just wait for the right stressful moment to move in. While crop rotation will help with a lot of problems, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference with stalk rots. WE’ve had some soybeans being cut for hay due to the dry weather. This is perfectly acceptable, remember that soybeans were first grown as a forage crop. To make a quality hay, though, you need to be cutting before pods are about an inch long and definitely before you start to get a lot of leaf drop. Think of soybean hay like alfalfa hay - most of the good stuff is in the leaves. If all you are baling up are drought stressed stems and pods, you won’t have much forage value. If you are thinking about haying some beans, give me a call first. Grazing may be a better option.

I spent a couple of weeks in Mississippi, Louisiana and points in between. Some of the time was at the National County Agents conference and part of the time was simply vacation. It may surprise you to hear that we saw a lot of areas on this trip that were looking a whole lot worse than it does here. We saw places where trees were losing all their leaves because of the drought. We saw some good looking crops and some pretty sad looking crops. Rice harvest was well underway in parts of Louisiana and we saw corn being harvested from northern Louisiana all the way up to northern Oklahoma. I saw milo harvest occuring down around Independence and Coffeyville. We even saw some sugarcane being harvested in Louisiana, although I think most of that was for seed. We did not see a decent looking pasture until we hit the southern edge of the Flint Hills. Yes, it’s a bit dry and hot right now (and it was down south too, we didn’t miss a day of that) but things are still looking surprisingly good around here, and it was sure good to get home!

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

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