Air September 3, 2003

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. Wheat production meeting is coming up tonight. It'll be at 7:30 at the 4-H building and I'm looking forward to it. It's probably still a little too wet to do much else so come on in!

Well, the rain over the weekend was certainly welcome. I was gone the last two weeks of August attending a family wedding and I told several people that it always rains when I leave the state on vacation. I was beginning to think that it would fail me this time, but it came through right in the end! The fact that we saw little runoff should point out just how dry it was and in many ways still is. Remember, it takes 2 inches of rain with no runoff to soak up an average foot of soil in these parts. So under the best of circumstances, we may have soaked up 2 feet of soil..... Or less. So what does this mean for all of us. Is the drought broken? Of course not - it's just a short reprive albeit a very welcome reprieve. We are still a long ways away from getting good subsoil moisture built back up and getting recharge into wells and springs. It's going to take several months of gray dreary cloudy drippy weather to fix that. What it does mean is that you're going to see one heck of a flush of volunteer wheat and annual bromes come up in wheat fields. This is good as it will give us a good opportunity to get this controlled via tillage or herbicides well ahead of wheat planting in another month. Don't be in too big of a hurry to get that controlled, but definitely 15 days ahead of planting. Will the rain be of any good to the beans and milo? Not as much as some might think. Obviously it'll stop any further decline but I'm afraid a lot of this milo is going to throw all it's resources into putting up a new tiller and head which simply won't have time to mature. Heads that are sunk down in the whorls of the leaves won't shoot up any further, it'll just be a messy harvest. Beans are a big question mark. Any pods and beans that are still intact and alive will benefit from the rain, but there was some serious damage ocurring to pods on plants that weren't showing much stress. And any new pods that get put on are probably also not going to reach maturity. But given all that, I'd rather still have the rain than not!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2003.

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