Air February 6, 2002

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. Okay, back into full swing on the meetings. A week from today is the Corn Production School at the city building in Milford. It’ll run from 9:30 til 2 PM. We’ll have a soup luncheon and refreshments. Please call the office and register so we have a good head count to make sure we make enough soup. We’ve got a great opportunity on February 21st to attend a leased hunting program in Clay Center. The program starts at 6 pm, but don’t worry, there’ll be pizza and soda for a nominal fee if you won’t have time after chores to get to Clay Center and grab a bite to eat. I’m planning on attending so if you want to ride along, let me know. The annual K-State Cattleman’s Day is coming up March 1st. It’s a few weeks off but mark your calendar now and I’ll get you more details in coming weeks.

The moisture from last weeks storm was certainly a nice change and we were lucky that we missed the ice that hit to the south and east. What does this do for our crops and pastures? Well, it’s a good start. But we’re going to need more than this before we can say it’s okay to burn pastures. What it has done is to really slow down the wheat from coming out of dormancy and added some good moisture to the top 6 inches. What it does mean is that if you were thinking about planting oats, I would feel a lot better about doing that now. Oat planting time is coming up and I always feel that oats should be planted between Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day. We also need to be thinking, once we get the ice and snow melted off and the ground sort of thawed back out, about alfalfa, brome and wheat fertilization. IF you thought you had applied all your wheat fertilizer last fall, and IF you had a lot of wheat growth last fall, you may want to consider an additional 30 pounds, or so, of nitrogen yet this spring. If you didn’t fertilize last fall at all and you had a lot of top growth, I would increase nitrogen rates by 20 or 30 pounds above what you normally would do. If you had a lot of growth and you grazed it heavy, I would increase it 40 pounds or more. We have historically under-fertilized our wheat. And we have the yields to prove it. Many producers have been aiming at 65 to 75 pounds of nitrogen and that equates to about 37 to 43 bushels of wheat. If we are serious about consistently growing 60 bushel wheat, we need to be thinking about total nitrogen availability in the 100 pound plus range. You’re going to get what you manage for!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2002.

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