Air September 21 - 28, 2006
Still a little early for wheat planting
This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. I'm going to keep hammering on this simply because I'm concerned about it. It's too early to be planting wheat. Now, some of you are concerned because it may take me two weeks to get my wheat planted. Fine, start on October 5th or 6th and if it gets much past October 20th, we can start to increase seeding rates. You see, it's far easier to compensate for later plantings with more seed and increased fertilizer than to try to fix a problem from Barley Yellow Dwarf, or Wheat streak... simply because there is no way to fix a fall disease infestation. From October 5th to October 20th we should probably be planting around 80 pounds per acre for most varieties. If you happen to have a large seeded variety, then you will want to increase that rate slightly to make sure that you are getting enough seeds in the ground. If you end up planting between October 20th and November 10th, you probably need to boost that up to 100 pounds per acre, and if you are still planting after November 10th, push it to a full two bushels. You can also increase starter fertilizer as you work later into the season. Cooler soils will start to reduce phosphorus availability so an adequate P level in early October may be slightly deficient in mid November. Get enough nitrogen on at or ahead of planting to ensure good growth, and then we can wait until January or February to determine how much we need to topdress. If you want to plant sooner than October 5th to do some pasturing, then please give me a call so we can discuss some of the necessary adjustments that you'll need to make! This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.
Last cutting of 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 have now moved into that twilight zone for alfalfa. Our rule of thumb is that we don't cut alfalfa after about the 20th of September. Now if we know that we've got a hard freeze pending - that's 25 degrees for several hours, so that the plants will go dormant or produce less than about five inches of growth, we can sneak one more cutting off. Or if we have enough warm weather that we can get about 12 inches of growth, or about a month's worth of growth, then we can go ahead and take another cutting of alfalfa. The problem is that we don't know when it's going to frost. We're about 3 to 4 weeks away from our average first frost, and average first 25 degree freeze is usually 10 to 12 days after that. But that can fluctuate a long ways in either direction. It's looking like an early frost isn't going to happen, but we still don't know. You see it's all about root reserves of the alfalfa plant - how much carbohydrates, or starches, are in that big tap root, or to use another analogy, how much fuel is in the tank. When you cut non-dormant alfalfa, it starts to regrow and that takes food from the roots. For the first few inches of growth, it doesn't take much, but then it sucks that tank down fast and then starts to restore the food reserves. We don't want to go into winter with an empty or even half full tank. Those plants will be more likely to develop disease problems or have winterkill issues thereby shortening your stand and hurting next year's production. So err on the side of caution. If you have standing alfalfa, just let it stand from now until we get that hard freeze! This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.
Flowers in the pasture
This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. Every year, about this time, I start to get questions about all the weeds in the pastures. When I start asking what weeds they are, the usual response is, we'll just all those yellow or white or blue or purple flowers. It is a common misconception that anything out in the pasture that isn't a grass plant is a weed. This is not right. In the highly productive, highly nutritious native prairie ecosystem, there is a mix of grasses and forbs, forbs being those perennial plants that are not grasses and not a wood perennial. Things that come back from a root stock every year but not from above ground plant parts. Many of these are native legumes that not only pull nitrogen out of the air and into the soil, but also raise the overall protein content of the forage that the cattle are eating. Many of them bloom late in the season, like right now and the land owner/manager sees them, doesn't see very much grass and assumes that there isn't much grass because of all the non grass plants that are out there. The interesting thing is that there aren't very many forbs that will out compete native grass. Musk Thistle can and so can sericea lespedeza, but not annual broomweed or gayfeather or pitcher sage or goldenrod. The blooming forbs are there because the grass isn't. The grass isn't there because it is being overeaten. Treating the symptom won't solve the problem. The problem is adjusting stocking rates so that the grass can recover and return to its native aggressive and competitive state. That is usually going to require a reduction in the animal units in that pasture and that's going to be a long process and some work by several of us. This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.
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