Air April 2, 2003

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. As often happens in April, it seems that we swing from late winter into summer with just a day or two of spring. I hope you didn’t miss it!

I’ve started to see some smoke in the air lately, hopefully most of it has been on Ft Riley or over at Konza Prairie, because the bottom line is that other than fire breaks, it is way too early to be thinking about burning. Should we even be thinking about burning this year? Well, let’s remember our 4 conditions for a burn. Do you have a reason, is there enough fuel, is there a full soil moisture profile and can you get the right weather conditions at the right time. If you can’t meet all four of those conditions, forget about burning. To be very honest, probably half of the pastures don’t have enough fuel to do a good burn anyway. Soil moisture may be tricky this spring if we get no more rains over the next few weeks. Some pastures seem to have adequate soil moisture, others absolutely do not! I think we also have a lot of pasture managers that have gotten burn happy over the last 15 years or so. If you are running stockers, especially early intensive stocking programs, then there is some justification for annual burning, but there’s also some potential drawbacks that we may need to talk about. If you are running cow calf pairs, then burning once every three to five years to keep brush and cedars in check is probably often enough. If you do burn, then timing is very critical. Most pastures are burned too early. The average burn date for the northern Flint Hills should be April 25th. Even in a very warm early year, that date only moves up to about the 20th of April. As you can see, most pastures have been getting burned a good 10 to 14 days ahead of this. Now, if you just burn early once every few burns there is probably little problem. But if you consistently burn too early, you will start to shift the species composition towards more cool season grasses, which simply don’t give you the forage production through the summer that you expect from the warm season pastures. If you go out in your pastures now, and you see a lot of green grass already growing - then we’ve got a problem and we need to discuss how you can manage it to get away from that growing problem. Give me a call and I’ll be happy to talk with you about it!

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

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