AIR November 3, 1999

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. There is no doubt about it, it’s dry. More on that in a minute. There may still be a few producers thinking about putting in some late wheat. My suggestion is don’t. We don’t have good surface moisture conditions and the near term doesn’t look that great either. On top of that, we’re getting late into the season. If you HAVE to plant a little more wheat I would strongly encourage you to boost that seeding rate up to about 120 pounds per acre and then pray for rain or snow!

With this dry and warm weather we have a great opportunity here to get some field work done. I think everyone knows that I am not a fan of very much fall tillage. I’ve been known to describe a lot of that fall, post harvest, field work as recreational tillage. A lot of times it serves no real purpose. However, I think we have an opportunity this fall to start working on some of our soil compaction. Soil compaction is something that is becoming more and more common. The problem with compaction is that it’s easy to create, tough to fix and can quietly rob you of yield. Every time you roll any piece of equipment across ground that’s a little wet, you create compaction to some degree. There can be surface compaction, there can be tillage pans 5 to 8 inches down and there can be heavy duty compaction even deeper than that. Sometimes you’ll see compaction show up in developing crops as diagonal lines matching up with tire tracks from previous operations. Other times it is uniformly distributed around the field. Freezing and thawing does slowly break up compacted layers, so does wetting and drying. But these processes are slow. To get a jump on the solution you need to go into dry soil and rip into and through the compacted layers. Normally this will mean ripping 8 to 10 inches deep or deeper. And it means that the tractor is going to be eating some fuel. You know you’re getting the job done if you see large chunks of soil moving around - I mean chunks the size of small boulders. It’s energy intensive work, but it needs to be done, and we’ve got a fall that has given us what we need, dry soil. What benefits will you receive? Soils that allow better water infiltration and drainage, better nutrient utilization, better root development and ultimately better yield.

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook '99

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