Air July 11 2001

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. The bad news is that it’s been hot and humid. It makes it very uncomfortable to try to get anything done outside and we always worry about heat stress on the crops. The good news is that it’s been hot and humid. The high humidity, while highly uncomfortable, lessens the water use of crops, lowers the stress on the plant, and for plants that are pollinating right now, like corn, it prevents heat damaged polled so we should have some good kernel set on those ears. We’ll know for sure in about another two weeks.

We’ve seen a couple of unusual situations develop this past week that I need to call your attention to. I looked at one soybean field in south-central Geary county that had been about half defoliated by garden webworms. We know that webworms can occasionally get into soybean fields, but not to this extent. One fellow from the college shot about an hour of video tape of it. The good news is that the beans were still small enough that we can spray the webworms and the beans should come out of it with nominal yield loss. Webworms are often found feeding on weeds like cockleburs. This field had a big stand of seedling cockleburs that was burned down with roundup and the beans planted right into it. As the cockleburs died down, the beans came up and the webworms moved from one to the other. It just goes to show you though, that you have to be on your toes at all times to be on the lookout for problems. And then don’t just assume that something can’t be or should be done. Give me a call so we can talk about how serious the problem might be. The second problem is also one that seems a little bit out of place and comes to me second hand. An alfalfa producer reported swathing a field late last week and upon getting off the swather to check something, found dozens of cutworms. We can’t rule out the possibility of cutworms at any time, but there’s also a possibility that they could be webworms also. Some of these critters in alfalfa can be very damaging, and others aren’t worth a second thought. If you’ve had alfalfa laying in a windrow for a couple days, you may want to check under the windrow before baling to see if there are cutworms or other caterpillars concentrated there OR if alfalfa is slow to regrow after cutting, you’d better check it out. And if you have any questions, give me a call!

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

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