Air July 4, 2001

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. Harvest has pretty well passed for most of the county. We still have a few fields to finish up, but it’s pretty well winding down. Once we got going the weather cooperated pretty well, so now that we’re over a little resumption in the rain would be good. Once we start to have a few showers be on the lookout for that volunteer wheat. It’s going to be a real problem in any fields that had a fair amount of shrunken kernals. I think for the most part we had fairly good yields across the county. Certainly nothing like we had in 1996 and 97, but a lot better than I’m hearing from some of the contacts in western Kansas.

I’ve gotten to look at a few milo fields this past week. The main problem was stunted yellowish plants. We’ve got a couple of things going on here. We did have some seedling disease problems this spring, brought on by the cool wet soils. In a few cases there was serious stand loss, but in most it hasn’t justified replanting. Compounding the problem this year has been a fair amount of herbicide carryover injury. To be right honest, it’s been pretty tough to tell the difference in some cases. In either case there’s nothing to be done and we’re plenty late to be replanting anyway. The biggest problem seems to be where milo was planted into soybean stubble that had any of the sulfnyl urea herbicides last year. These products need moisture to break down and we just didn’t have enough of that last year. It also has been worse in low organic matter or sandy soils. If you happened to have a strip of higher pH soil, this be a problem also. One last crop note this morning, if you see anything unusual happening with soybeans, please give me a call!

My thoughts wander this morning to Philadelphia in the Pennsylvania State House where 225 years ago today the continental congress voted on, and eventually signed, a one page document penned over the last several weeks by a 33 year old gentleman by the name of Thomas Jefferson. In all the hustle and bustle we sometimes forget that those 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence literally put their lives and fortunes on the line to form this country. In all the hustle and bustle of events today, take just a few moments to think about what that document was all about, and how important it still is to us today.

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2001, wishing everyone a happy 4th of July!

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