Air July 7, 2004

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone.

Well, is anyone surprised by the weather right now? I think we knew that we could have a summer or part of a summer like this - and the said part is we could turn right around and have a terribly hot end of July and August. But I certainly hope not and every rain gets us one day closer to maturity of our corn, sorghum and soybean crops, not to mention stock water in pastures. I've been receiving a ton of calls about light green or yellow soybeans. Nearly all of this is caused by saturated soils. The bacteria don't work well, the soil goes anerobic and all sorts of weird things start happening to soil nitrogen when that happens and in fact, roots just start dying! Drier weather is all that's needed - don't waste money trying to fertilize these areas. It isn't necessary!

While some producers are trying to get the last of their wheat harvested, others are thinking about post harvest tillage or weed control. Naturally as wet as it is I don't think anyone is going to be getting into the field very soon. In fact, I would discourage you from being in too big of a hurry. There's a couple of reasons for that. First of all, the more wheat seed that we can get germinated now, the more effective will be your herbicide or tillage treatment. I know that there is concern about wheat curl mites and wheat streak mosaic, but the critical time for that is still two months off. So let's just wait. Another advantage to waiting as long as possible is to get the soil as dried out as possible. I am seeing a lot of problems this year with root systems on crops that is the result of soil compaction. Soil compaction most often comes from repeated machinery operations on soils that are just a little bit wet, not even muddy, just a little bit damp. Start walking your wheat stubble fields and see what's out there - if you are finding a lot of bindweed you may want to arrange a combination spray for both the volunteer wheat AND the bindweed. As for cheat seed, it has to go through a dormancy period or a rather cool weather period. We've had neither so there's very little, if any, cheat starting to grow already Activity now will gain you little in the way of cheat control, but if you are thinking about rotating, please do - it's the only way to handle a cheat problem!!

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

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