Air August 15, 2001

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. Just a couple of quick reminders - you need to be checking those pastures and moving cattle out early if you have low grass reserves. Get those weeds and volunteer wheat controlled in your wheat stubble fields. Be on the lookout for webworms in alfalfa and beans. And remember that spider mites were popping up in soybeans in late July. It looked like the predators were starting to catch up, but it doesn’t hurt to try to stay on top of that problem.

August 15th is one of those red letter days on your crop calendar. That marks the start of the alfalfa planting season. I like to see alfalfa planted the last half of August and the first week of September. This just seems to do the best job of getting the seed up and those plants established before cold weather and frost set in. Granted, sometimes it takes a lot of faith to be planting alfalfa in mid-August, but I saw a field go in last year about this time and it came up and had an amazingly respectable stand. I would hope that if you were planning to plant some alfalfa that you have already brought in a soil test. If not, hurry up, we should still be able to crank it through in a hurry. If we need to sweeten up some acid soils, we need to get that lime down and worked in ahead of planting. More than likely you’ll need some starter fertilizer. Most often we put down about 100 pounds of 18-46-0, but if you don’t need the phosphorus let’s not waste the money. A soil test is the only way to know for sure. Use a good quality named seed. Planting Kansas Common, whatever that is, is like buying a pig in a poke. You really don’t know what you’re getting. I like to see 15 to 18 pounds of pure live seed per acre applied. Under that and you lose production, over that and you don’t really gain anything. Also make sure that you treat that seed with a good inoculant, that has been kept cool, right before planting. That inoculant is very sensitive to high temperatures. Throw that bag of inoculant up on the dash of the pickup and leave it there for a day or two, and you might as well be throwing dust on the seed. Alfalfa is a valuable crop. So let’s take the time to set things up right to begin with, so we can get 6 or more years of production out of it!

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

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