AIR November 10, 1999

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. I just took a look at the record book and checked the official temperature for Monday and it appears that we set a record high for that date. A record by the way, that goes back to that brutally hot year of 1954. That’s not the kind of records that I like to think about breaking.

You may have started to hear about something known as TMDLs. Those four letters stand for total maximum daily loads and they refer to the total amount of certain things that we call contaminants or pollutants in surface water. Once we exceed the set TMDLs then that surface water is described as being impaired for certain uses. I am not going to go into excessive detail this morning about these. TMDLs are going to hit everybody and things like waste water treatment plants, storm water runoff, riparian buffers and sediment control basins will start creeping into everyone's vocabulary in the coming years. Most of Geary County is in the lower Republican upper Kansas sub-basins and these were all ranked as top priority areas in the state’s water management plan that evolved from litigation between EPA, a couple of organizations and the state of Kansas. What you need to be aware of right now is that everything that all of us do can have an impact on surface water quality. The more we do, voluntarily, to cause positive impacts on water quality the less likely we are to see state or federally mandated activities. You could say that our destiny is in our own hands - let’s don’t fumble the ball.

I was going through my daily mail yesterday and was reviewing some of the livestock marketing updates. What caught my eye was the table of quarterly net returns for finishing feeder steers in Kansas. It was a chart of the past ten years. What was good to see was that we’d had positive returns for the first two quarters of 1999. This was after 6 straight quarters of losses, losses in excess of $100 per head for most of 1998. What was rather spooky was that the ten year average was a negative six and a half dollars a head. Stay tuned in coming months for opportunities to learn how to improve performance by a few bucks here and there, which may be all you need to stay profitable in the cattle business!

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

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