Air May 2, 2001

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. How many times have we seen this? We seem to move from winter into about three or four days of spring and then bam, right into summer! The good news is that the weather service is still saying that there’s a good chance of the summer being somewhat cooler than normal. On top of that, the most recent long range forecast also shows a good chance that we could have above normal precipitation for the summer. Gee, what a pleasant change that would be. With the warm temperatures it is even more important to keep an eye on your alfalfa fields. For every ten degree temperature increase, most insects effectively double their activity. They’ve been real active the past week or so.

I know that there were some folks still finishing up corn planting, but we’ve got a lot of producers who were hoping to start planting soybeans as of last weekend. Is this too early? Early is always such a relative term. My rule of thumb is to not plant soybeans until soil temperatures are up to a 60 degree minimum. We should be there now, especially given the unseasonably warm weather we’ve had the past week or so. One management practice has me a little concerned that past couple of years. With the advent of Round-up Ready soybeans we have more people trying to get by with just one or maybe two applications of roundup. The problem with this approach is that soybeans are much more sensitive to early season competition than corn or sorghum. We know that corn and sorghum can tolerate a fair amount of early season weed competition. As long as we get things cleaned up a few weeks after emergence there doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. With soybeans, we have a different critter! Those first couple of weeks set the tone for so much. I strongly encourage a very basic preplant or pre emerge herbicide to just keep early competition down. If you can’t or don’t want to do this, then you need to just plan on two roundup treatments and make sure that you get out there fairly early with that first shot. Everyone’s worried about saving a few cents given high production costs and low commodity prices. But, as the old saying goes, let’s not be penny wise and pound foolish!

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

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