Air October 16, 2002

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. Harvest is moving along nicely and wheat planting is also showing excellent progress. The yields on the fall crops is certainly less than ideal, although given the summer we had I think many are grateful for whatever we have - it’s better than nothing! There is always an urge to make some changes, sometimes drastic changes after the harvest is in. After a bad year or two or three, the urge gets real strong and we need to resist that urge. Making drastic changes based on severe weather influences is a bad idea. It is better to stay the course, wait for a more normal year and then do a good evaluation.

I’ve also been getting questions about what to do with the alfalfa. Many fields have the best looking alfalfa on it that we’ve seen all year. So what do we do? Well, the absolute best thing to do would be to do nothing until after we’ve had a hard enough freeze to really put the crop dormant. We haven’t had that yet. The worst thing that we could do is to cut it now and have about 10 days of regrowth and then have that hard freeze. As soon as we cut the alfalfa it will start to use up root reserves to regrow. If we can get 3 to 4 weeks of regrowth we would get those reserves restored. After ten days, we’ve sucked those root reserves down to about their lowest point. Okay, everyone’s short on hay and we’ve got a good looking stretch of weather. I’m not going to blame a single person for putting up this hay. We won’t kill very much alfalfa doing it, but we will need to manage it a little more closely if we do get a quick freeze on small regrowth. If you do try to sneak in another cutting before fall, make absolutely certain that you give that alfalfa a good shot of about 60 pounds of phosphate later this fall to help it recover next year.

And if you have been feeding CRP hay or grazing CRP pastures this fall and you suspect that there may have been some sericea lespedeza in some of that forage, you may want to hold the cattle for 4 to 7 days in a confined location before turning them out to other forage. This would give the sericea seed time to get through the system and concentrate where new seedlings might come up next spring, making it easier for you to look for volunteer plants you will need to spray!

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

Return to Radio Home Page

Return to Ag Home Page