Air June 12, 2002

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. I’m spending a little bit of time out at 4-H camp this week so don’t get too frustrated if you can’t get a hold of me. If you do call the office please leave me a message. I get frustrated when you call and call and call and never leave a message, because then I don’t know that you are trying to get in touch with me and it precludes me trying to catch up with you in the evening.

The wheat is moving along nicely - of course the hot winds from time to time may be pushing it a little faster than is best, but at least earlier this week it was a hot humid wind, which is better than a hot dry wind! I don’t want folks to be too disappointed in their wheat yields, but I don’t want you to be too surprised by some of those fields either. Some of those fields are looking pretty good and may shock you when you pull in with the combine.

I’ve been seeing a lot of soybean fields that are getting real green real fast, and it isn’t all soybeans that is causing that green cast. I’m sure that many of these fields are planted to roundup ready beans and there are a lot of weeds coming along quite nicely. I know that many soybean growers try to get by with just one roundup treatment to keep the cost down. Unfortunately, this may end up costing the producer yield. Soybeans, much more so than milo or corn, is very sensitive to early season weed competition. I think we need to get in there earlier than we are on those fields with the first roundup treatment and then just plan that we’ll need a retreatment. Now an alternative management approach, albeit a little late for this year, is to apply a low cost lower end herbicide to give some early season weed control, knowing that even if it isn’t perfect, it’ll give you a few weeks of control and then you can follow up with that one treatment of roundup. In conventional tillage that low cost treatment might be Treflan, or in notill perhaps a sencor or lasso treatment. Just because the beans are Roundup ready it doesn’t mean that that is all you can use to control weeds! It just gives you a little more flexibility and you still have to manage your fields responsibly!

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

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