Air February 5, 2003

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. In the last 5 or 6 years we have seen a big drop in the acres of grain sorghum being grown as producers have had the option to move away from their traditional base acres and plant more corn and soybeans. Given the production of corn and soybeans the past few years, there is a little interest in maybe going back to a few more sorghum acres. If you need to get back up to speed on what’s happening in milo production then there are a couple of regional meetings coming up that should be of interest to you. On Friday, February 21st their will be a Grain Sorghum production school in Salina. The meeting will be in the 4-H building at the fairgrounds in Kenwood Park. The meeting will start at 9:30 AM. There is no charge and no preregistration required. If that date doesn’t work for you, the same program will be presented on Thursday, February 27th at the American Legion Hall in Marysville. Again there is no cost, but the county agent there would like to know how many are planning to attend. Give me a call and I’ll get you registered for the Marysville meeting.

After hitting the minus side of the thermometer a couple of weeks ago, then two days up into the sixties and now back down into the teens, there is some understandable concern about winterkill not only in the wheat but also in seedling alfalfa. With no significant rainfall until October, there was a lot of wheat and alfalfa that was quite small or just coming up when colder weather finally shut down the fall growth. Small plants are less able to survive weather extremes than well established plants. We know that plants, even small plants, that are in moist soil are more resilient than plants in dry soil. So I feel that we did have enough surface moisture to do us some good on that front. But we had wheat plants that were small enough that I’m sure 5 below did some damage. It is very hard to determine the degree of damage on small plants and especially this early following the cold. In another couple of weeks we would expect to see some new growth on the wheat, and we did over the weekend. If a plant is totally dead, we can tell soon. More than likely we are going to see a thinning of some stands, but the remaining plants will compensate. The really small alfalfa is another story. Let’s watch this stuff closely and be ready to reseed in mid April if need be.

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

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