Air February 23, 2005

Thank you Jerry, and good morning everyone. I'm going to hop around on topics a bit this morning - let's get started. Soybean producers remember that at 7:30 tonight at the 4-H/Sr. Citizens Building, we'll be having a soybean rust informational meeting. If you grow soybeans plan to come to this meeting.

Now, a week from Friday, March 4 is the 92nd annual cattlemans day at Weber Hall on the K-State campus. The first Friday of March is the traditional date for this event and the programs just keep getting better and better. The trade show and morning general overview sessions are always good, but the real meat comes in the afternoon with the focus sessions. There'll be presentations on rebuilding the US beef herd and the implications of a global marketplace, cow herd synchronization systems and of course, animal ID and the national premise identification system. The kicker on this one is that for the first time there is a pre-registration and a registration fee. Now the registration deadline is this Friday, but if you call me at the office I can still get it done on line. The pre-registration fee is $15 and if you do wait and register at the door it'll be $25. Don't miss this great annual event!

Finally this morning, I'd like to close with my annual report of wheat variety plantings across the state. Let's start off with the big shock, again this year, Jagger was the number 1 variety planted not only in the east central crop reporting district, but in all of Kansas as well. In the east central district, jagger was planted on 32.2 % of the acres in east central Kansas and 28% of the acres in the state. Okay, the rest of the top 5 in eastern Kansas were 2137, Jagalene, Dominator and 2174. Across the state the remaining top five were Jagalene, 2137, TAM 110 and 2174. The other interesting observation has to do with blends. From 1998 through last year blends grew from 2.6% of the acres planted to 15.2%. Then this fall we saw blends drop off to just 11.3%. Whether this is a momentary blip or a leveling off or signaling the end of a trend, we won't know for a few more years!

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

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