Air May 14, 2003

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. That’s the problem with rain storms this time of year. To get the rain you have to risk the hail. And even a little hail can do a lot of damage.

I want to remind everyone of the Agronomy Farm Field Day coming up on May 27 at the KSU Agronomy Farm down on Ashland bottoms. There’s going to be a lot of good wheat information there, as well as access to a lot of the specialists. Contact me for more information.

I’ve been spending a lot of time out looking at wheat fields lately. Some of that was evaluating hail damage. If you see heads broken over or parts of a head, maybe even just a few kernels, killed then you are probably seeing hail damage. Frost damage is going to show up less obviously and will normaly be concentrated in low areas. If you see what you suspect is hail damage soon after a storm, be sure to call your hail insurance adjustor as soon as possible. It never hurts to ask. The other things that I’ve been looking for are chinch bugs and leaf diseases. Fortunately, the chinch bugs haven’t been liking the cool wet weather. There are still adequate chinch bug populations to cause problem in sorghum, so don’t think you’re out of the woods there yet. Carry on as if there will be a chinch bug problem. Wheat leaf diseases. So far this year we had been only lightly plagued with such minor things as powdery mildew and tan spot. With the increased crop residue we are leaving in fields, we are seeing more tan spot so you may want to file that one away as something to look for in variety selection. One thing that we’ve been waiting for is rust. Leaf rust is always a concern, and many of our traditional varieties have seen their leaf rust resistance broken. A heavy outbreak of leaf rust is going to nail the likes of Jagger, Karl and 2137. What we have been expecting this year, and arrived in the past week was stripe rust. Stripe rust showed up two years ago and caught everyone off guard. The good news is that Jagger and Karl have good stripe rust resistance. I was in some fields of 2137, a stripe rust susceptible variety, and was seeing 1 to 10% of the flag leaves infected early this week. Of course, with the price of wheat what it is and most wheat blooming, it’s too late or not practical to be treating with fungicides... Now we just have to worry about rain during blooming and scab..

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

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