Air February 9, 2005

Thank you Jerry, and good morning everyone. We're finally starting to get the rest of the winter bulletin releases in from K-State. We now have the soybean and milo variety testing results in stock and I recieved the first release of the updated weed control herbicide book so I expect that those will be in just any day now.

February is a transition month. Even by the end of February we're still 3 weeks away from spring, but it is usually the month when we see signs of life beginning again in the plant world. Not a lot of people grow oats anymore, but you shouldn't just give up on them completely. With the growing number of horses there is an increasing demand for good oats, and they can still fit in nicely with certain rotations or using them as hay. Oats need to be planted between Valentine's Day and St Patrick's Day for your best production. If you haven't grown oats for a while, oats production has stepped up a notch or two so you may want to give me a call to discuss some adjustments to your oat production strategies. Every year I receive a few calls from producers wanting to burn off a brome field or especially brome waterways. Unfortunately, they are calling about the time that we burn native pastures and by then the brome fields are entirely too green to even consider burning. While there has yet to be the detailed studies on effect of burning that we have with native grasses, we know that you can burn bromegrass. This needs to be done, just like with our native warm season grasses, just as they are breaking out of dormancy. With bromegrass you have one and sometimes two chances a year to do this. The first is in late February or early March when spring growth begins. The other can be in August or September if it has been dry and then late summer rains start new growth. Bromegrass can have small amounts of winter growth so you have to be careful and make sure you are getting that rapid spring growth in late February. It will usually be a slower more smoldering fire, especially this year. Just like the natives, you want to get rapid regrowth after the burn to minimize the length of time that you have bare soil, hence the reason for not burning too soon. The same rules apply for safety so get that burn permit, call in for clearance and clean up those brome fields!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2005.

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