Air May 8, 2002

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. Yes, I am back! After a month in Senegal, West Africa I am glad to be back home in Kansas. It was a wonderful opportunity and I certainly learned A LOT. Most importantly, I learned how great we have it here in America and how much we take for granted!

Having just been back about a week I’m still busy getting back up to speed on where we are with crops, insects, diseases, etc. The rains have started again, but we can’t seem to get area wide rains of enough intensity to start filling ponds, but that might have started to change a couple of nights ago! I have been in a couple of alfalfa fields and there are alfalfa weevils. Don’t automatically assume that we are getting close enough to first cutting to not spray. Cooler weather is on its way and that will slow the alfalfa down a whole lot more than it will slow down the weevils. And not spraying in a timely fashion will not only hurt this cutting (which you probably won’t worry about because first cutting always gets rained on) but the damage will decrease the yield on future cuttings as well! What about chinch bugs? Well, we already know that chinch bugs overwintered in WHEAT in south central parts of the state. I saw some wheat in this area that was plenty big enough to harbor chinch bugs this winter so even with timely rains at this point in time, I would just assume that you are at risk and go ahead and use a planting time treatment or Gaucho treated seed. Wheat disease pressure has been relatively light up until now. But with increasing rainfall I would be surprised if we did not see an increase in leaf disease problems. The lack of leaf rust last year probably means that it will need to blow up out of Texas and we’ve just now had some southerly winds so don’t be surprised to see some leaf rust in the coming week to ten days. Finally this morning I encourage everyone with cattle out on grass to keep a close eye on those pastures during the coming weeks. Those prairie plants are stressed badly this spring. The little bit of rain we’ve had has not been enough to get us out of the woods. Make plans now of what you will do if you have to pull some, or allof those cattle off pastures early. I think it is going to get wetter as we move through the summer, but if it doesn’t, what’s you plan?

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

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