Air August 18, 2004

Thank you Jerry, and good morning everyone.

Okay, we could use some rain now. I know that 2 months ago we weren't thinking this and even a month ago we wanted just a little bit more dry weather to get some work donw, but now we need the rain! But on the bright side, the return to more normal August temperatures is exactly what we needed for the grain sorghum and this dry down has now made for a good time to get some field work done!

The latter half of August, especially when we've had some drying weather, is a great time to start getting that volunteer wheat destroyed. It is also, assuming that your fields have dried out fairly well, a good time to stick a chisel in the ground and punch on through some of the compaction that happened earlier this year with damper soil conditions and get it ripped up. Back to volunteer wheat first. If it is getting really moisture stressed, that volunteer wheat may be hard to kill with glyphosate. I don't know that Gramoxone will be any better, but with one of the roundup type products definitely go to the higher rate. If you are going to control the volunteer with tillage, this weather is going to be great for that. We've had fairly continuous green all summer long so we are at an above normal risk from wheat curl mites, the well documented vector of wheat streak mosaic. Now you may think that wheat streak mosaic is just a western Kansas problem and not a big deal here, but I have seen more than one Geary county field that has been hit hard enough with wheat streak to cause more than a 1/3 yield loss field wide. It can happen in Geary County and we could be set up for an outbreak of it. With the dry weather we can get that volunteer destroyed now and end that green connection. Two to three weeks of brown will kill all those curl mites, they're tiny and can't travel far, and then one more control measure before planting and we will be in good shape. Back to the compaction issue. I see more and more compaction problems every year. We had just the right soil conditions early this summer for lots of compaction to occur. Compaction can only be dealt with when the soil has dried out so you can fracture it easily, so now may very well be a good time to stick a chisel down through some of those zones and get it ripped up, paving the way to a good start to the 2005 wheat crop!

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

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