Air October 2, 2002

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. I was talking to someone yesterday who asked if they could plant wheat yet. My response was, if I say no will it stop you? We both laughed. If you are going strictly by the book, no it isn’t time to plant wheat yet. That wouldn’t be until Saturday. Gee, maybe it’ll be too wet on Saturday to plant wheat. Wouldn’t that be nice. I was looking at some wheat earlier this week that was showing an orangish yellow cast to it. This is not at all uncommon when we have warm to hot weather at planting time OR deeper planting in drier soils. Coleoptile, or shoot, length is decreased when soils are very warm, which they have been. The shoots take longer to come up and the problem is basically a lack of chlorophyll. If you also have hot days and cool nights we can get real obvious orange banding on the coleoptiles. These are both temporary conditions and will diminish over time. Now the wheat that I was looking at did have good moisture down at the root zone, but a good rainy spell would sure help. If you are grazing that wheat, make sure it get’s well rooted before turning cattle out. That is usually about the time it is starting to tiller so it’ll be a little while yet. And remember that grazed wheat often needs 20 to 30 pounds more nitrogen if you also want to take off a near normal grain crop.

With rising crude oil and natural gas prices there have been concerns expressed over diesfel fuel and anhydrous ammonia prices for next spring. Some of our economists have been busy taking futures prices and forecasting possible prices. The bad news is that prices will probably spike on up through the next few months, but unless something changes drastically we don’t expect prices to be anywhere near what they were back in 2000. As always, if you get a change to lock in some realistic prices I wouldn’t hesitate to do so.

Most of you should have heard about Geary County being declared a disaster area by USDA. We’re still sorting a lot of this out. The low interest emergency loans will probably be of little interest to most of you, there could be some benefits to those who have to sell livestock earlier than normal, and we’re still waiting for details on the Livestock Compensation Program. As details became available I will share those with you.

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

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