Air March 31, 2004

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone.

Wow - I was kind of surprised by that weekend rain - not necessarily disappointed, but I wasn't expecting an inch of rain - that's for sure!

Let's jump right into wheat and alfalfa this morning and start with army cutworms. Army cutworms started showing up a couple of weeks ago and last week they went nuts! Army cutworms are typical cutworm size, fairly dark, but not as dark as black cutworms, and very fond of wheat and alfalfa. They like thin wheat growing in heavy mulch and cover. Lush growing wheat can often withstand low levels of cutworms with little problem, but we were seeing levels that were definitely requiring spraying. The occurrence of the army cutworms was very much sporadic with no rhyme or reason as to where they were, I was seeing areas of alfalfa fields a couple acres in size that were nearly completely stripped of green growth. And sadly, they are still going to be around feeding for a couple of days. If you have wheat or alfalfa that seems to be going backwards, we better take a look at it pretty quick to see what's going on. The other thing I found last week was a lot of newly hatched alfalfa weevil. Populations in some fields were already reaching treatment thresholds by last Friday. The good news is that any fields that needed army cutworm treatment are going to see good control of weevil that have hatched or were about to hatch. But we need to watch this situation closely. Cooler weather will slow them down quite a bit, but it won't kill them. Some of the rains will have knocked some down and drowned them, but not all. Okay, a couple of other notes on wheat this morning. I was picking low to moderate levels of tan spot depending on how much old wheat stubble was on the field. Now, the rain over the weekend is going to get tan spot and likely speckled leaf blotch really cranked up and going. Finally, jointing wheat, wheat pasture and cattle. A few calls on how soon cattle need to come off. I was looking at some pretty lush wheat late last week that was just starting to joint. And that wasn't all the tillers, but the first heads are moving up out of the crown of that plant and you need to starting getting those cattle off that wheat pasture if you don't want to hurt grain production!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2004.

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