Air August 28, 2002

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. We had a good turnout at the FSA meetings regarding base and yield determination under the new farm program. Now, this isn’t where this thing ends, in fact that is just the start. If own farmland or operate a farm, you should have received a notice of base acres. If you think there are errors on this, you need to contact the FSA office immediately. Later, you will be receiving more information on yields and at that point you can start analyzing your options. Very soon I should have available a spreadsheet to help analyze your options. If you have a computer and the Microsoft Excel software, you can obtain this software from myself or from K-States web site. I will notify you when the software becomes available.

The soybean aphid has been found and confirmed in Geary county. I mentioned this as a possiblity recently, but couldn’t confirm it at that time. For this year, this is going to be a novelty. It would appear to have blown in from Missouri or Iowa on some of the east and northeast winds in recent weeks. Right now our biggest interest is just in monitoring the situation so if you notice some small yellow aphids on the top leaves of your soybean plants, please give me a call and let me know so I can follow up.

I also want to follow up on my comments last week regarding volunteer wheat. Obviously, we never like to let volunteer wheat continue to grow as we approach wheat planting time. Obviously we are very short of forage this year and anything green and growing that cattle might ear looks like gold right now. If there are no fields to the north or east within a mile that are going to wheat you are at low risk of having a wheat streak problem. If there are, you have a couple of options, one is to forego any utilization and control the volunteer soon. Perhaps a better option is to fence it and load it up right now and get it eaten down so that 2 weeks prior to planting you can destroy what is left. We didn’t have a lot of green bridges this year to keep the curl mites alive, so the risk should be low, but we can’t say that there is never ANY risk.

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

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