Air February 12, 2003

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. Just a quick reminder that there are Grain Sorghum meetings on the schedule for February 21st in Salina and February 27th in Marysville - call me for details. I also want to make you aware that the 2003 Chemical Weed Control bulletin is now available in the office. It’s even thicker than in past years, and lots of new information. One trend that is becoming real obvious is that many of the so called new chemicals are just old chemicals that are packaged into premixes. Read the fine print carefully. Sometimes these new premixes are cheaper, sometimes they aren’t. It’s up to you to do the research!

I had the opportunity to spend all day last Friday thinking "outside the box" when it comes to production agriculture. The afternoon speaker was discussing the potential of year round grazing. There was one concept that he brought up that just won’t leave me alone. In essence it was the idea of how we are all locked into thinking about things the way we’ve always done things, which makes it hard to explore new ideas. For example, we plant corn and we immediately think of it as a grain crop. If we have a drought, like last year, we will consider cutting it for hay or silage. Now, if you are only a grain producer without a cattle operation, it sort of curtails this discussion. But what happens if we plant corn with the expressed intent of grazing it? Let’s go in after wheat harvest (assuming we have good soil moisture) and plant corn In fact, we are going to just plant bin run corn (assuming it isn’t Bt or Roundup ready corn that prohibits that) so we have very little cost involved and if it busts, what are we out? Why not plant oats this spring, maybe 4 or 5 bushels per acre and maybe even throw in some turnips, and then graze those oats out. That we can hold off moving those cattle to native range until late May and the native has a chance to get in a little recovery. See what happens when you think out side the box - it may mean some changes, but there are a lot of options. I do have to put a little caveat in there that you do need to visit with the folks at the FSA office about not doing anything that would put you out of compliance.... But there’s often ways to get around a lot of these issues and end up with much more grazable forage!

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

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