Air October 25, 2000

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. Rain has certainly been a welcome sight to the local weather picture. Regardless of how much or how little, it is great to just see it happening. If warm weather continues and we start to get a lot more of this wheat emerged, let’s keep an eye out for aphid problems. If large numbers start showing up, we may need to consider some treatments, but let’s hope that doesn’t happen again this year.

I’ve been receiving a lot of calls this fall, about alfalfa. Do I cut it? Do I let it go? If I cut it, when? Is it going to kill it if I cut it? To be right honest, no matter what you do, alfalfa will have been stressed by this summer and fall. Most of it was fairly dormant for a good two weeks with very little growth occurring after August 1st. Normally, the kind of freeze that we saw earlier in the month would have pretty well shut the alfalfa down for the winter. But since most of it was so dormant, it didn’t really notice. Now with some of the showers we’ve had, and the cooler weather, I’ve noticed some of it starting to green back up and grow. It doesn’t matter what you do with the old standing stubble from the late summer’s growth. If you removed it in the past 6 weeks or not, most all of the new growth is coming from the crown of the plant, not those stems. At this time, it also doesn’t matter if you remove those old stems or not. I probably wouldn’t because there’s not much there to work with. The best thing to do right now, is nothing. Eventually we’ll have some more cold weather and then the plants really will shut down for the winter. In the meantime, any new leaves that are produced will simply help produce food to build up the root reserves. Sometime this fall, I would seriously consider apply 40 to 50 pounds of phosphate to all alfalfa stands, and this might also be a good year to apply a dormant season weed control product. I’m afraid we may see some very weedy alfalfa next spring otherwise. Then, once that stand does go dormant, do whatever you can to remove all that old growth. You can hay it off, you can graze it, you can even burn it late in the winter. But you will want to get rid of those old stems because that’s where the alfalfa weevil will be laying her eggs this fall. Good alfalfa next year depends a little on mother nature, and a little on what you do this fall.

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

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