Air August 14, 2002

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. A reminder of the 2 Farm Service Agency Meetings on the 22nd of August, next Thursday. There will be one at the 4-H/Sr Citizen Building starting at 1 pm and the other will be that evening at 7 pm at the Humboldt Community Center. FSA staff will be on hand to discuss base & yield provisions as well as the direct and counter-cyclical payment methods for the 2002 farm bill. While many of the more popular segments of the last farm bill were retained, there are some big changes in other parts of the farm bill. It would be to your benefit to come out to one of these meetings. I will be at one, if not both of these meetings and I hope to see you at one of them as well.

I think we are sometimes too quick to give up on a crop in dry weather and pull the trigger to swath it or ensile it. We have not yet run out of time to get a grain crop off many of these beans. From pod development to the start of physiological maturity, the bean plant only needs about 32 days. With the weather what it is, the heat is likely to stay in place, so if we can just get a few timely showers over the next month there will be grain to harvest. Of course, the caveat in all of that is that we still need to have green leaves on the beans and I’m seeing a lot of green in many of the fields around the county. More people have been asking about grazing beans as well. Yes, it can be done. Bloat does not seem to be much of a problem, but turn them in on the beans with a full belly to reduce that risk. Some of the forage folks are telling us that there is a potential of the protein level being a little too high leading to the same kind of problems we can have on real lush wheat pasture. You can also flash graze the soybeans and if it rains you can even get regrowth for more grazing later. One thing that we haven’t talked too much about put probably need too is that many, or rather most, soybean herbicides have restrictions for grazing and haying soybeans. With a few exceptions, the label of most products says don’t. This requirement is brought on because they probably haven’t tested hay from treated bean fields for residue. Is the hay toxic? Probably not, they just haven’t tested the plants for residues. Now that you know the legal issues, you can go ahead and make your own decisions. Contact me for more information on this.

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

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