Air December 13 - 19, 2006

Prepping the farmstead for winter

This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. The first winter storm of the season came blowing through the state a few weeks ago, and we were lucky - it missed us, barely. But it should serve as a great wake up call. Think of it as somebody whapping you up side of the head with a 2 x 4. Winter can be here anytime now, and when it arrives, it's too late to start getting prepared. You need to be prepared before it even gets here. Okay, I know what you're thinking now. "Chuck, we haven't had enough snow to worry about for the past ten years, why should I get all fussed up over this?" It's simple, we may not have a bad winter this year. It may be warmer than normal and drier than normal and we may have even less snowfall than the piddly amount we had last year. But I know, and deep down you know, that every additional year that goes by that we don't have a bad winter, just gets us that much closer to the one that we'll talk about for years to come. So let's get ready. Get all that cold and snowy weather gear into your personal and work vehicles. Extra gloves and caps and blankets. A shovel, some jumper cables, and always have at least a half tank of gas in your car. Clean up the shop area on the farm so you can get the critical tractors under cover and plugged in when that winter storm comes rolling along. Get tow ropes or chains ready, get the farmstead cleaned up so snow removal will be easier, you don't want to find some piece of equipment with the front end loader by accident or bury something that you'll need. That winter we talk about may not be this winter, but the more prepared you are now, the better. This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.

Herbicide update - alfalfa

This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. We all too often don't think about alfalfa herbicides until it's too late to do anything about it. Sure, we've got roundup ready alfalfa available now, but how many of you have it growing already? And even if you do, the less you have to rely on the roundup, the longer it will be before we are troubled with roundup tolerant weeds, which by the way are already showing up in Kansas. While many folks don't give it a second thought, we have quite a few herbicides available for use in alfalfa, but many of them require an application in the dormant period. Wellll guess what - we're in the dormant period, so let's think about it. We have had Karmex and Velpar available for a long time, but we just seldom use them. And now we have a new premix from Dupont called Velpar AlfaMax Gold. It's a mix of Velpar and Karmex that, as a dormant treatment, can give you really good control if you have a lot of things like henbit, downy brome or other winter annual weeds. Sencor has been around for quite a while and can give some pretty good control to both winter and summer annual weeds. Likewise Pursuit and Raptor offer options but need to be more of that pre-emerge line. Now, I'm not going to say that any of you have been doing it, but for years there have been reports of alfalfa growers using Prowl as a late dormant season treatment with reports of good control. Well, now it's legal. You can use Prowl at 2 to 8 pints per acre and apply it after spring growth, but before you have 6 inches of growth, but you do have a 50 day waiting period until harvest, so shoot for a late February or very early March application of Prowl. This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.

No-till fertilization issues

This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. One of the things that I really love about my job is that everything is always changing. There's always new things to learn, new problems to tackle, new challenges to rise to. You would think that we know everything there is to know about crop production, well of our traditional Kansas crops anyway, but the truth is, we don't. As more and more producers move into notill crop production, and they do it for more and more years, we are suddenly seeing things happen in fields that we never thought would happen. What did we always tell you about lime applications? It has to be worked in to the soil. Wellllll, that isn't really the case. Applied lime can work, slowly, into the top two to four inches of soil and affect soil pH. So we can apply lime on acid soils and adjust pH in enough of a zone so that seedlings can get roots established and we can see benefit. You need to usually cut rates in half because we're only interacting with the top three inches instead of 6 to 8 inches, but it does work. For just about ever, we've said that around here you would never need potassium fertilizer unless you were taking off corn silage for about 20 consecutive years. But know we are seeing nutrient stratification in no till soils. If you keep planting your rows in about the same area in the field, we find that potassium, in those row areas, has gotten low enough that we are seeing potassium deficiencies in notill corn that is then responding to potash applied at planting. The cold soils and the constant removal in a narrow zone has created this situation. Corn growers, take note. There's always something to learn and always some way to gain a little more yield! This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.

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