Air December 6, 2000

Thank you Mark and good morning everyone. Continued. cold weather and continued dry weather creates its own problems, but it may also create some opportunities. With some of those ponds becoming dry, or nearly dry, this might be a good time to do some pond renovation work. Keep in mind when you see all that silt in the bottom of the pond where it came from. And then think again when you hear someone complain about all that runoff from grassland and you think, what run off ....

Even though we are rushing pel mel into the holiday season, this may be a very good time to do some planning for your 2001 fertilizer program. For starters, nitrogen prices are ugly and getting uglier. Remember that one of the prime ingredients of commercial grade nitrate fertilizers is natural gas .... need I say more. After visiting with your tax accountant you may want to buy some nitrate in advance. You may even want to consider doing more with anhydrous ammonia. I know that many of you are leary of anhydrous ammonia, and I don't blame you at all. But it is the cheapest nitrate source out there and in many cases will work very well in your cropping plan. You may also want to start looking at some legume cover crops, soil testing and legume nitrogen benefits as ways to reduce your nitrate bill for 2001. Many producers are also realizing that starter fertilizer is becoming more important, especially in notill and or early plant fields or corn and sorghum. We are seeing some very interesting and very consistent results from ten pounds of sulfur and 20 to 40 pounds of chloride in notill corn and sorghum fields. Liquid starters are an easy way to go and many farmers have been retrofitting drills and planters to accomplish this. One easy way is to dribble the fertilizer in the furrow, however, you will have more flexibility if you place that starter 2" below and 2" to the side of the row or over the top of the row right behind the press wheels. In row applications have fairly small limits on how much you can apply before seedling damage occurs. You also need to be careful of using the same nurse tanks for starter fertilizer that you do for herbicide. A very small amount of herbicide can do a lot of damage.

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

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