Air April 18, 2001

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. Once again, as so often in the world of agriculture, weather dominates our conversation. First hot, then windy, heavy rains and hail in isolated spots of the county and hardly any rain in other parts of the county. Then a cold front blows through and we saw frost once again. One farmer commented yesterday that he thought the wheat had gone backwards on Monday. I said I didn’t blame it!

Probably the first question on many minds is whether the past couple of frosty mornings did any damage to the wheat. In a nutshell, no. Most of the wheat is anywhere from not yet jointing, to just jointing to early jointing. At those stages, we would have to have temperatures down around 20 degrees or colder for several hours to do damage. A light to moderate frost, like what we’ve just seen, should not be a problem. Yes, compared to last year, the wheat seems well behind normal. And compared to the five year average, we’re running behind. But that is just a function of the extended winter weather that we had through February and March. I’m still convinced that we are in fairly good shape locally, especially compared to a lot of the rest of the state. I’m really surprised by the number of calls I’ve been getting this week, asking me if it is too late to burn pastures. My biggest problem with this question is to not laugh out loud. If you are burning when the big bluestem and indiangrass has ¾ of an inch to 1 inch of new growth, it is still too early. In the pastures that I’ve been looking at, the indiangrass shoots were just coming through the ground over the weekend. Given the weather that we’ve had of late, the best time for burning should be starting about this weekend. If you are seeing a lot of green in your pasture, then I am very doubtful that it is big bluestem and indiangrass that you are seeing. And if you have so much green that you can’t carry a fire, then you’ve got a lot of problems and we need to have a long talk. How late can you burn? The grass will tell you that. If the only kind of fire that you can get going is a slow smoldering fire, then it’s probably too green. For pasture in good conditions, we’re probably still two weeks away from that still!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2001.

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