Air October 9, 2002

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. Well, it was sure nice to get the rain last week, and just in time for wheat planting. In fact, we even started to see a little runoff from the rain so it was nice to see that it could still rain. I went to put in a quick word for the upcoming elections. If you are not registered to vote, you have about two weeks to get registered. You can do that at the county clerks office at the Geary County Office Building at 8th and Franklin. If you aren’t sure if you are registered to vote or registered at the right address, contact the county clerk’s office. Have a say in your future, register and vote!

Now back to the rain. A lot of things are going to happen now that it rained, in fact a lot is happening. We are going to see a lot of cheat and volunteer wheat coming up so you may want to hold off just a bit before planting so you can till this stuff up and then plant into a clean seed bed. Now, I wouldn’t be in a hurry to worry about getting that wheat in the ground. The soil is warm and the long range forecast is for it to continue to be warm. The past several years we have seen what happens if we have excessive growth on that wheat in the fall. If you are going to graze the wheat, it isn’t that critical, but if you don’t graze and we have another dry spring, early planted wheat is really hurt. Additionally, excessive fall growth, especially in warm falls, will be very attractive to aphids. Aphids carry barley yellow dwarf virus and fall infection of barley yellow dwarf can really hurt yield. Be patient, the season is still young. We haven’t had a killing frost yet so we are going to probably see a lot of new shoots coming up on sorghum plants, both forage and grain. These new shoots are going to be really high in prussic acid and possibly nitrates. If you have cattle grazing sorghum fields, stubble or otherwise, I would want to get them off until things calm down a little. In some cases, we may have to wait until clear after a killing frost. Once we have a hard freeze, hard enough to kill the plants, that prussic acid will leave usually within 3 or 4 days. The nitrates don’t disappear with frost, but after some good growth we will usually see nitrates down to a safe level. Some nitrate tests have been done on recent samples of sorghum silage and fresh sorghum and the levels have been medium to low.

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

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