Air December 15, 2004

Thank you Jerry, and good morning everyone.

I had the privilege of spending most of last week in Buffalo NY with the national leadership team of our county agents association. We had county agents from all over the country there working on our upcoming national meeting and other association business. I found the discussion, in the non meeting hours, to be very very interesting. It seemed that a lot of the work related discussion came down to two things - animal ID and soybean rust.

I wish I could tell you more about electronic animal ID and all those coming changes, but the truth is there's so much we don't yet know. To be bluntly honest, what the general public and Washington lawmakers want right now, can not be done. The technology barely exists and is not widely enough available to be put everywhere that they want it. Full and unchanged implementation of electronic animal ID would put many small and part time cattle producers out of business. It would simply be too much hassle to be worth the effort. I don't think that this is what we want to see happen. Soooooo for the time being we are waiting to see what happens and what adjustments are made before final regulations are actually in place and enacted. Soybean rust is a big concern to everyone right now. We have national board members from Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. These guys are scared to death and with good reason. Soybean rust will overwinter, that far south, on wild legumes including clovers and kudzu. We don't know how far north soybean rust will overwinter. It appears, from some early work, that soybean rust needs to be detected and treated while still at fairly low levels, or you can kiss the rest of the season good bye! For those folks down south, it could easily mean multiple sprayings per crop. These aren't going to be cheap either! We don't know how fast the rust will move north, when it'll get here and how much we'll need to treat, if at all. There is resistance available, but we don't know how long until we get it into popular varieties and how long until the resistance breaks down. Do you quit growing soybeans then? I'd say not yet! Let's keep a good rotation of different crops in the plan and re-evaluate as we gain more information!

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

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