Air June 7 - 20, 2006

White Wheat Heads

This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I’m Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. Quite a few folks have been asking me about white wheat heads this year. And no, they weren’t talking about hard white winter wheat. They were talking about those very obvious white heads that were showing up when a lot of the crop was still green. White heads can come from a lot of different sources. To me, one of the most obvious is wheat stem maggot damage. In wheat stem maggot damage, just one head per plant is usually affected and half way down the plant, the tiller, and leaves were still alive. If you grabbed the head, it would easily pull out of the plant and at the bottom of the stem there was obvious feeding damage. This damage shows up every year and there is really no control for it. Damage is usually very very limited, but I have to admit that this year there appeared to be more than normal. Another cause of white heads can be take-all disease. Take all will be much less common with annual crop rotation OR if you keep a field in continuous wheat for ten years or more. But if you just go two or three years in a row you can see a lot of it. Take all is a soil borne fungus that is not a problem with annual rotation. It kills out one entire plant with all it’s tillers, but all the surrounding plants appear perfectly normal. About the only other thing that I would have expected this year, to cause white heads, would be premature dying. In other words, the wheat plant just ran out of water and it got too hot. While its kind of a moot point now, there you have the most common causes of white wheat heads in our hard red winter wheat crop. This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I’m Chuck Otte.

High Dollar Fertilizers

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 more reassuring parts of this job is knowing that certain issues just never go completely away. New versions of old products go by and a new marketing whiz kid comes along and tries to put a new spin on a product that really isn’t a new spin or a new product. In this case, it’s liquid fertilizers, fertilizers sold as premium quality or low salt fertilizers. They will promote that they are made from food grade or feed grade products. Many of the reasons that these high priced production materials are used for food grade uses don’t matter to plant production. It doesn’t matter whether the phosphorus source is food grade orthophosphoric acid or conventional wet process orthophosphoric acid. The small amount of metals present in wet process, will not be an issue for the plant. It is an issue for human food consumption, but the metals become locked in the soils and are not going to causes problems with the plant or for us from the plant products. It doesn’t matter whether you are using food grade urea or fertilizer grade urea, the amount of biuret, a plant toxic compound, is so low in both it won’t be a problem to the plant. These companies play on your fears. Don’t let them. Extensive testing of these products over the last 30 years have shown no differences in plant performance. Comparing pound of actual plant nutrient of one fertilizer to a pound of plant nutrient from another source shows no difference. Quick and dirty test - if a company is insistent on pricing their product by the gallon, it probably means that it’s too expensive to be priced on a per ton basis and you should find a cheaper product! This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I’m Chuck Otte.

Summer Annual Forages and Nitrate Toxicity

This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I’m Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. Any time we have dry summer weather we start go get concerned about nitrates in cattle forages. And rightly so - nitrates are a very real concern and while not restricted to drought years, we certainly have more problems in dry years. When we are growing the forage sorghums or sorghum sudan crosses producers may be hesitant to apply any nitrogen fertilizer for fear of developing a nitrate problem in forage. The truth is, that not fertilizing can create just as much nitrate risk as fertilizing. Nitrate toxicity is caused by physiological conditions with plant growth. If the plant takes up nitrogen and can’t get it converted into it’s normal forms, you will have free nitrates floating around in the plant and that’s a problem. A few days of cloudy cool weather can cause a spike in nitrates in the forage. The first week after a good rain during a drought will show incredible nitrate levels because the plant is putting on a growth spurt and is taking up nitrates faster than it can process it. The key is to test for soil profile nitrate levels and then fertilize according to the expected production. It’s going to take about 40 pounds of nitrogen to produce one ton of forage. If you’ve got 20 pounds of profile N and figure you can produce two tons of forage, then you need to add another 60 pounds of N. If you are concerned about dry weather, you can apply some at planting and then side dress later on if things are looking better. You need to fertilize to get a crop. We can test the forage for nitrates and manage that after the fact if we have too! This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I’m Chuck Otte.

Forage Testing Even More Important This Year

This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I’m Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. Would you buy range cubes for your cow herd without a certificate to guarantee their protein and energy levels? I really doubt it. You want to make sure that you are getting your money’s worth and that your cattle aren’t being short changed on their nutritional needs. Yet, how many times do you feed home grown hay without testing it? Now try to rationalize the difference for me. Oh, you aren’t buying the hay so you’re not afraid of “being took”? Trust me, that hay wasn’t free! It cost you plenty to grow it, swath it, bale it and store it. So why doesn’t it have value? And we’ll just make sure we feed extra just in case it is lower in quality, hmm? I can’t buy that logic folks!! If you are not testing every lot of forages you harvest you are taking yourself to the cleaners. You may be over feeding, or under feeding and either way it is costing you money. Oh, you have hay left over every year that you wind up burning or dumping into a gully some place? Then why are you spending the money in baling it if you don’t think you’re ever going to use it or sell it? With diesel fuel costing what it is now days, I wouldn’t be burning an ounce more than I need too. We have a bale probe at the Extension Office. Put it on a good cordless drill and you can sample a cutting of hay just pretty darn quick. Then spend 25 bucks on a forage test and you have the information you need. That bale probe spends way too much time in the office. I wish it was gone so much that we needed to buy a second one. I would find the money in our budget to do it. In fact, with the money you save in one year from proper feeding, you could probably afford to buy one and a new drill, yourself! This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I’m Chuck Otte.

New Nitrogen Fertilizer Products

This is Ag Outlook 2006 on 1420 KJCK, I’m Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. I recently talked about some of the high dollar fertilizer products and how they were made to sound too good to be true. Guess what? The alternative nitrogen fertilizer products never go away either. They just keep getting recycled with new names and then we have to spend a lot of time and money to show that these new products aren’t any different from their predecessors and no matter how you package it, snake oil is still snake oil! I could probably stop right there..... but you know I won’t! There has been a run of products recently being touted for the humates, or humis or humic acid that they contain. The advertisements make it sound like this is something new. Excuse me! Humus is a relatively stable organic product formed by the normal microbial decomposition of animal and plant remains. It is a naturally occurring major component of virtually every agricultural soil. Many of these products are rather pricey and are being sold by the gallon to be applied at the rate of a couple gallons (or less depending on the price) per acre. At the most, a gallon of this stuff isn’t going to weigh more than 15 pounds, probably less. So how do you think they can claim that one gallon is equal to 15 - 30 pounds of conventional nitrogen fertilizer products. I certainly don’t know! But let’s do the math. One acre furrow slice - one acre by six inches deep, weighs two million pounds. If, like many ag soils, you have 2% organic matter - essentially humus - you have 40,000 pounds of humus in that acre furrow slice. No tell me what you really think a gallon or two of this miracle stuff is going to do for you? Save your money folks! This has been Ag Outlook 2006 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I’m Chuck Otte.
 

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