Air November 15, 2000

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. Welcome to winter! With last year yielding the warmest November on record, and the year before that the 6th warmest on record, it’s a hard adjustment to come back to normal, or a couple degrees below normal for the first two weeks of the month. At this rate, we may challenge 1996 and end up with a November among the top 5 coldest. Just for torture, I looked back at last year. We were running in the high 60’s to low 80’s a year ago. Average is not what the last year or two was - average for mid November is highs in the mid 50s and lows in the lower 30s.

For you hog producers, swine day is tomorrow, November 16th at the Holidome in Manhattan. Registration starts at 8:15 and the morning program starts at 9 a.m. There are some very good speakers on the program and it would behoove any and all swine producers to be in attendance.

I’ve been receiving a few phone calls about fertilizing bromegrass. First it was too dry. Producers who would normally have fertilized in September or early October, didn’t because, quite frankly, the brome looked dead! Then in October it finally rained, and by golly, that silly stuff wasn’t dead after all! Now it’s cooling down, way down, and some producers are wondering if they can still fertilize now or if they need to wait until late winter or spring. Through long term studies (read that as over 20 years) at Manhattan, The best, most consistent response came from November - early December applications. Second best was February applications. April applications of fertilizer produced less total forage, but did increase protein content anywhere from 1 to four percentage points. If you are fall grazing brome, probably not much this year, then we recommend a split application with the first shot in late August. Getting back to the original question. November fertilization of bromegrass is fine, as long as the ground isn’t frozen. If it doesn’t warm up soon, we may have that problem, but for the near future, we’re okay. Give the recent rains, I would not hesitate to go on with a full shot of fertilizer. I’d interpret that to be anywhere from 80 to 120 pounds of nitrogen, 40 pounds of phosphorus and 20 pounds of sulfur. A soil test would allow us to fine tune that, but in the absence of a test - go with this rate!

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

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