Air March 30, 2005

Thank you Jerry, and good morning everyone. Great rains last week made for a sloppy go, but the wheat was happy to see it and so was I! We're on a rust theme this morning - both leaf rust in wheat and additional soybean rust considerations.

Leaf rust appears to have overwintered in southwestern Kansas. That doesn't really concern me very much as rust there rarely blows into our part of the state. However, down in Texas and Louisiana they are already spraying for leaf rust, 3 to 4 weeks ahead of schedule. That does cause me some concern. We'll need to be monitoring our fields closely to a possible early outbreak of leaf or stripe rust. If it happens, we can't recommend blanket spraying. We'll have to take a look at the price of wheat, the yield potential and the cost of the treatment to decide if we do or don't. We rarely get economics that are conducive to spraying fungicides in wheat, but let's stay vigilant. We should expect to be seeing a lot of powdery mildew, tan spot and speckled leaf blotch early in the season. We've already seen a little soil borne and spindle streak mosaic. Given the nice fall we had, I'm also expecting some barley yellow dwarf virus as well.

On to soybean rust. Monitoring this is going to be very critical for everyone, even more so if you have crop insurance. IF, and that's a big IF, we have soybean rust show up in our crop,there is going to have to be a lot of record keeping done. I would recommend visiting with your crop insurance agent now, well ahead of any potential problems. Basically the feeling is that if you have soybean rust, crop insurance will cover your losses if you sprayed. However, there are certain conditions where your losses may be covered even if you don't spray. If you are advised to spray and you just don't want to spend the money, that's your loss. But, if weather conditions don't allow a timely spraying, or if there aren't enough sprayers to cover the acres or if the disease comes in late enough that we don't recommend spraying, then we have a different situation. So keep track of when the disease is detected if it does show up and keep track of when you talked to me or anyone else about the advisability of spraying. We're all going to learn a lot this year, so let's just keep learning it together!

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

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