Air March 9, 2005

Thank you Jerry, and good morning everyone. We're a third of the way into March, we're ten days away from the official start of spring and there's lots of tasks looming on the horizon for the next couple of weeks.

First of all, let's start planning now for those prescribed burns. We have good soil moisture and good fuel, two of the many requirements we need. The next is to determine if you need to burn. If you don't have a brush problem and you have a cow calf herd and you've burned anytime in the last three years, you probably don't need to burn. If you do need to burn, because of brush control or other reasons, now would be a good time to get out there and get some firebreaks mowed and burned. Then when you have that one day of decent weather, it won't take long to get the burn completed. But remember, burning native pastures is not a task that has to be done annually. Once every three or four years is probably more than adequate for most pastures. If you wanted to burn brome pastures or waterways, you are about to run out of time - you'd better hurry up and get it done! Likewise on those brome fields, you're about to run out of time for optimum fertilization, actually that was about 3 months ago. But you can still get plenty of good out of that fertilizer if you can get it applied before April 1st.

Wheat producers, the wheat really greened up last week and it starting to take off. If you are grazing any wheat, start watching for jointing so you can move those cattle off, but we're still a ways away from that yet, at least ten to fourteen days. If you haven't gotten that wheat topdressed, you need to get that arranged pretty soon. And of course, are you putting on enough fertilizer. With the price of fertilizer of late, it's tempting to back off on those rates a little bit. But regardless of the cost of the fertilizer, if you apply less than the optimum rate you will just be increasing your cost per bushel. Sure, that total cost goes up as price and application rates increase, but the lowest cost per bushel will still come at that optimum N fertilization rate. Rule of thumb is 1½ pounds of nitrogen per bushel of wheat target yield. 60 bushels equals 90 lbs.

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

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